


The one where Erik owns an antiques shop and Charles is a professor

by aesc



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Charles is a professor in every universe, Erik has Issues, F/M, M/M, Raven has a writing group, completely and totally implausible!, not quite what it says on the tin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-16
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:59:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 53,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesc/pseuds/aesc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even though Charles loathed people using "I must have a genetic predisposition for X, Y, or Z" as an excuse for personal shortcomings and peccadillos – he was a professor at Columbia and a well-respected researcher in the field, he couldn't <i>not</i> get riled about scientific inaccuracy – he suspected the Xavier family had a strong expression of the gene responsible for squirreling away every random object that came across their paths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 1stclass_kink prompt [here](http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/8359.html?thread=16885927#t16885927): "[...] Erik owns a small antique shop, and is quite content to live among his antiques. Charles is a busy college professor, who one day stumbles upon this charming little antique store, with its even more charming owner. So he starts making more and more excuses to come back to the store daily, buying more and more useless antiques he does not need/want (much to Erik's amusement, the smug bastard), until eventually he and Erik hook up."
> 
> This fic wanted to be... not quite that. But there is an antiques store, and Erik owns it. And Charles is a professor.
> 
> The title exists as it is because I honestly can't think of a better one at the moment. Also, mostly this is something to mess around with because the Jane Eyre AU is stressing me out, and I have a dissertation to defend in ten days.

Even though Charles loathed people using "I must have a genetic predisposition for X, Y, or Z" as an excuse for personal shortcomings and peccadillos – he was a professor at Columbia and a well-respected researcher in the field, he couldn't _not_ get riled about scientific inaccuracy – he suspected the Xavier family had a strong expression of the gene responsible for squirreling away every random object that came across their paths. Or, rather, his sister Raven – adopted sister, Charles should clarify – suspected this, and Charles, in the face of overwhelming evidence, had to agree.

His great-great-great grandfather, who had built the ancestral home, had loaded it down with European art. Great-great Grandfather Xavier had introduced his menagerie of taxidermied animal specimens, some captured on safari, some on scientific expeditions, and others – according to legend – pilfered from the Natural History Museum in London. By Charles's day, they'd become mangy enough to be moved to a very, very distant attic. Great- _grandpère_ Xavier had amassed a collection of certain objects Charles hadn't been allowed to see until he'd turned eighteen, and that one time had been more than enough. _Ma-mère_ had owned a legion of cats; Charles's first memories of the mansion, before his father had inherited, were fuzzy, punctuated here and there by sharp stabs of pain and bouts of sneezing.

Charles's father, a researcher himself, had collected old medical instruments, the sort that looked more like torture devices than anything meant to save a life. Raven, despite the relationship she'd had with her adopted parent, had been drawn to the grisly arrangement of steel forceps, extractors, syringes, clamps, and amputation saws. It explained many things about her, Charles thought.

And as for himself… "You should be glad I collect only books," Charles told her, whenever he came home from the bookstore or an estate sale. "At least it's not nineteenth-century enema apparatuses, or whatever."

"At least you can _talk_ about nineteenth-century enema apparatuses with people," Raven would say. By _people_ she usually meant her friends, all of whom were younger than Charles could ever remember being, and none of whom were capable of appreciating the sublime happiness of finding an overlooked author, or a diamond in the rough first edition in someone's bargain bin.

"I don't know what the fuss is about buying old things only to clutter up your house," Charles would say, to illustrate how he had more in common with Raven than his somewhat unstable ancestors. This required him to ignore the ten stacks of books waiting to be catalogued, and the twenty stacks he'd not yet read, but Charles was quite good at ignoring things he preferred not to acknowledge. "Honestly, enema apparatuses, stuffed dodos, or otherwise, it's all rather silly."

* * *

For Charles, the first few days of summer break usually meant an uncomfortable hiatus after running the gauntlet of finals, several days of loose ends and restlessness before hitting his research stride. This year, it meant a month (a _vacation_ , Raven insisted, _look on the bright side_ ), with his lab building shut for upgrades, and something about proper ventilation to prevent explosions. Hank – research assistant, brilliant young man, reminded Charles of himself in many ways – had gone morose and silent when told how long their lab would be closed, and somewhat pitifully asked if there was anything he could do. Charles knew how he felt, and vented his frustration by being unable to concentrate on the literature for the next round of experiments and staring moodily out the window at the garden.

"Honestly!" Raven barked after five days of Charles milling aimlessly around the house. It was a big house, and purely by coincidence Charles had done most of his aimless milling in Raven's presence. "Honestly," Raven said again, "I know you love my company, but I need to get some writing done, and you need to get in the car and _go somewhere else_. Go somewhere else before I kill you."

Charles went. Raven's one concession to unrestrained bookbuying was true crime books, and by this point, she could probably plan and execute the perfect murder herself. With, Charles thought unhappily, an antique enema apparatus.

 _Going somewhere_ in the middle of a Saturday afternoon meant going into town and joining the throngs of rich, bored people who had come up to North Salem to count their money and the tourists who had come to gawk. Charles quite liked people, although usually not _en masse_ , and certainly not when they came in slow-moving shoals that stopped dead on the sidewalk to gawk at something in a shop window or hold conversations on their cell phones. He endured the crowds long enough to nip into his favorite bookstore and buy one or two things (or four; one of them was on Jack the Ripper, as atonement for driving Raven around the bend), and then into a coffee shop.

Life, Charles told himself, when it involved a book and a cup of tea, was very good. The day was a day for being outside, the air the clear, cool air of an early New York summer day, with the strongest of the sun's warmth spilling on the concrete outside the coffee shop awning and nothing but comfort under the shade. He sipped his tea, offered a quick smile to a young lady rushing by – she returned the smile absently before eeling around two shambling tourists to run across the street – and, _Vintner's Luck_ opened to page one, watched the town move on around him.

After a few minutes, he noticed that much of the activity clustered around one particular storefront, one of the innumerable antiques places that cluttered the main street – and, for that matter, most of upstate New York. A handwritten sign announcing its re-opening, a half-deflated cluster of balloons anchored to it by ribbon, explained why Charles had never once noticed it before. If memory served (Charles had not been to town in a while, and rarely paid attention outside of the few stores he visited), the antiques shop had always been one of those moribund stores that hung on despite having no visible reason to do so.

Re-opening or not – and the storefront, with _Antiques_ decaled into the window (scraped, here and there, to look appropriately aged), was hardly prepossessing – a sizable crowd had gathered in front of it, a few people emerging now and then with brown paper shopping bags and relieved expressions.

For the most part, as far as Charles could tell, antiques stores fell into two categories: those that specialized in selling things the Xaviers had spent almost two hundred years accumulating, and those that specialized in selling scraps of wood masquerading as eighteenth-century weathervanes and chipped porcelain, the sorts of things people put away for good reason, because they were broken or tacky, and better off collecting dust somewhere. However – and this was what had Charles swallowing the rest of his tea and darting across the street with purpose – some of them chanced to have a decent collection of old books, even if those books were only meant to take up space on a beaten-up bookcase or armoire. Some even had, as a tragic afterthought, boxes of old books stashed somewhere, usually off in a corner as if unfit to socialize with the detritus dug up from other people's cellars and attics.

He had to fight the hipsters and trophy wives to get to the door. In the windows reposed some motley assortments of objects: in one, porcelain cats clustered around an urn painted with a florid, fleshy lady in a turban and immense dress, and in the other (which indicated the name of the shop was "Old Things"), wooden children's toys and a rocking chair upon which sat a truly terrifying rag doll. Charles had some time to study the cats, trapped as he was behind a wall of Gucci and thrift-store shirts.

Once through, and once his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw the reason for the crowd, and it was not the random collection of oddments and furniture scattered across the shop's dim interior.

The man behind the counter did not at all fit the description of an antiques dealer, or at least the description Charles had formulated. Antiques dealers wore button-downs and fusty cardigans and corduroys, not white t-shirts that skimmed an abdomen straight enough to rule lines with, or battered jeans that suggested a life spent outside doing rugged activities like wrestling steers or climbing mountains. Charles absently straightened his cardigan and ducked behind a battered curio before the man behind the counter could catch him staring, and resumed his observation from behind the screen of some vintage pepper grinders.

A young man in jeans so close-fitting Charles wondered if his blood supply had been cut off past his hips was hovering indecisively at the front of the line. The man behind the counter scowled, said "I don't know anything about it" when the young man inquired after the provenance of a copper teapot, and settled into a menacing silence while the skinny be-jeansed young man dithered.

"Buy it or not, I don't care." The man's voice, with more than a thread of steel in it, suggested that only an immediate decision either way would prevent bloodshed. Wordlessly, the young man pushed the teapot across the counter, along with his credit card. The man ran the card through with a vicious efficiency, collected the young man's signature, and offered him the tea pot again.

"I don't suppose I could get a shopping – " A blond woman moved between Charles and the counter, so Charles couldn't see whatever was on the other man's face, but whatever it was had the young man collecting his new-old teapot and hustling out.

The crowd pressed him inexorably back, into a room that smelled as though it hadn't been aired since the middle of the previous century, possibly the century before. It was also, Charles observed with delight and despair, where the books were kept. (Delight because, _books_ , despair because a room like this was made to rot paper.) He fought against the urge to buy the entire collection just to save it from a musty, water-stained doom, and instead settled himself in to peruse the selection.

It wasn't… bad. Not "good used bookstore" level but certainly above an old fruit crate stuffed with paperbacks. In a few minutes of searching he found a turn-of-the-century illustrated guide to the birds of the Hudson River Valley, in excellent condition. On the next shelf he found a copy of _Ulysses_ covered over with the scribblings of a frustrated student. Under that he found something called _The X-Men_ , which was pulpy and thin and, in the subtitle, asked enticingly _They were enemies in the battlefield, but what about…?_ He tucked that one safely against his chest.

"You're a book whore," Raven had said one of the last times she'd gone through his library. "Seriously, it's like you just _look_ at them on the shelf and are like 'Take me, I'm yours' and then your wallet's open… Wait, that metaphor's backwards. You're like the book equivalent of a sex addict, you can't control yourself. You need help. You need an intervention. There's a TV show about it."

"And you're overdramatic," Charles had replied. "And I can stop any time I want."

He left the book room before temptation grew too great, and added himself to a line that snaked by a few end tables and a preserved elephant-foot umbrella stand (from which Charles recoiled). The man behind the counter dealt with the line much as he had the unwitting boy and his teapot, with no sense of customer service whatsoever, and so it was that in very short order Charles found himself depositing his books on the counter, with _The X-Men_ and the two ridiculously costumed figures on its cover on top.

A corner of the long, angular mouth drew up, and its silence was as eloquent as if the man had spoken words. Charles felt his face heat, because jesus what the hell had he been thinking, from the way the men on the cover were looking at each other it might as well be _The XXX-Men_ , and the guy behind the counter knew it.

There was nothing for it, Charles supposed. He looked the cashier square in the eye and said, "I've always found the classics are worth re-reading."

That earned him a huff of laughter and a sidelong look.

"You seem to be doing well," Charles said calmly.

"Yes." Fingers – long, dexterous fingers, _graceful_ Charles thought with a distant helplessness – tapped out numbers on the register. "Unfortunately." The half-smile grew, from something private into something that invited Charles to share in the amusement, and Charles found himself smiling back.

"I've never really noticed this place before," he said as the cashier bent to hunt around under the counter top. His spine traced an elegant curve under the t-shirt, broad shoulders and narrow hips, and Charles swallowed roughly. "Did you buy it or something?"

"Or something." The paper bag opened with a flick of a wrist, the books deposited inside. The cashier – owner? Charles wondered how someone in an utterly ordinary shop could be so mysterious – handed Charles his books, with an expression that seemed to search Charles's face for something.

What it might have been, Charles had no idea and no time to parse it out. The blond woman from earlier poked him in the back with a manicured claw and a "Do you mind, sugar? Some of us would like to do other things today," and Charles, abruptly apologetic and very British about it all, muttered his excuses ( _I'm so terribly sorry, I do apologize_ ) and darted out.

* * *

Six o'clock took its sweet time coming, but come it did. He shut the front door emphatically behind the last customer (who had dawdled until he had almost been too distracted by lurid revenge fantasies to ring her out) and, leaning against it, breathed a sigh of relief.

"Well," Moira said as she sidled out from the back room, "you survived it."

"Thank you for that." He flipped the lock shut. "I don't suppose you have a line on more worthless crap in the area I can sell."

"Don't you mean valuable antiques and _objets d'art_?" Moira smirked. ""I'll take care of it."

"Like you've taken care of everything else?"

The answering silence was dangerous, Moira's good humor withering in the heat of temper. "You know I had no choice in the matter _Eisenhardt_ ," she said, leaning on the name until it threatened to snap under the pressure. "You knew what you were in for, coming here." She sighed and redirected her displeasure to the shop, empty now except for the two of them and the damned, dust-collecting antiques. "If only I'd known what a pain in the ass you were going to be about it, I probably never would have agreed to help you."

"You're always welcome to leave," he said. "I never asked for your help in the first place."

"You needed my help in the first place," Moira said baldly, and the hell of it was, he knew she knew _he_ knew he'd needed her, and still would, until all was said and done. He'd moved from Oklahoma because the temptation – the opportunity – had been too great to resist, and Moira, who'd long ago learned she could get what she wanted if she gave him what he wanted, had given in, and had been clever enough to hide the stinger buried in a list of conditions as long as his arm.

"Moving here was risky enough," Moira said, like she was reading his mind; they'd worked together long enough (if "working" was the term) that she probably could. "I won't have you screwing everything up now."

"I won't risk it," he said with a calmness he didn't feel. "Now help me sort this place out. It's a fucking disaster."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter two**

Raven had forgiven him for being obnoxious when he'd handed her the Jack the Ripper book, and made extensive fun of him when she saw his other purchases. With accounts squared, Charles couldn't protest her friends descending on the house for the evening.

"Charles, you know I love you," Raven said as she burrowed through the liquor cabinet, "but pretending I'm fifty-five years old gets, well, _old_ after a while. Besides, it's my turn to host our writing group this month."

"Whenever I happen to wander in, there doesn't seem to be much writing going on," Charles said, and then added, "And I am not, contrary to reckless exaggeration, fifty-five years old." Raven shot him and his cardigan a filthy look and hefted a bottle of The Macallan 1824. Charles made a strangled noise and lunged for the bottle, babbling apologies. "What novel are you working on this month, anyway?" he asked to cover himself, and returned the bottle carefully back to its place.

"The one with Lesley." At his blank look, Raven added, with some impatience, "the _assassin_? The one who's tricked into killing her own father and decides to take revenge on the people who manipulated her?"

"I confuse her with the other girl, the one in your second book. Crow?"

"Blackbird." Raven scowled. "The shapeshifter whose _older brother_ is trying to _control her life_ by telling her how she should look, and so she decides to strike out _on her own_."

"Right." Charles shrugged uncomfortably. He wondered how it was that someone he'd known his entire life, almost twenty years, could be so unfathomable, and her writing was a touchy subject for Raven. "I have to come up with some work for Hank to do while we wait for the lab to clear, so if you need me for anything, I'll be in the library."

"If we need someone to tell us we're being too loud, I'll be sure to call." Raven expertly filched two bottles of red and, tucked under her arm, a bottle of bourbon. She kissed him on the cheek and darted out.

Charles wandered down the hall, past some of Great-great-great Grandfather's paintings. The house echoed around him, staff off in their own corners of the property and chaos not yet descended. He spared a moment for the wistful thought of company, someone to play chess with or talk books with, but most of the people he knew were colleagues. Either that or they were Hank, who was his student and thus Charles's intellectual responsibility, and who got skittish whenever Charles invited him to do grown-up, professorial things, like run the genetics research group seminar or take second author on a paper. Most of their neighbors up here Charles didn't know all that well, spending most of the year as he did in a flat closer to the university, and at any rate, he had little idea about polo or investments or whatever it was other rich people talked about, and he suspected (no, he _knew_ , because Raven had told him once) most ordinary human beings would glaze over after ten seconds' discussion of evolution and genetic adaptation.

The antiques shop man suggested himself, a flash of that wide, expressive mouth and grey eyes, and Charles was horrified to discover that at least part of his mind – the deeply, deeply sexually frustrated part – had devoted itself to working out if there had been _something there_. Charles collapsed on the couch with a whoosh of breath and stared blindly up at the distant expanse of the ceiling, a canvas on which his mind's eye painted that mouth again, that face, the peculiar and eloquent curve of muscle and tendon and the t-shirt stretching over a collar bone.

"I am not thinking about this," he told himself. "I'm not, I refuse to."

To prove it, he picked up his purchases from earlier in the day, intending to add them to the stacks of books waiting for shelf space. They smelled of the antiques shop, of dust and the thick, musty scent of cheap paper. An _ex libris_ sticker inside the copy of _Ulysses_ said it had belonged to one M. Mactaggert. Mark? Morris? Michael? He looked like a Michael.

"I am not thinking about this," Charles said again.

He thought about Raven instead.

Her "writing group" was, so far as Charles could tell, a group composed of writers who very rarely wrote anything. Raven insisted the group was meant for "inspiration and critique," which Charles imagined translated to "drinking and bitching" in the real world. "Oh, like all you guys do at your geek conventions – " ( _conferences, Raven, or symposia, they're not conventions_ ) " – like all you do is talk about genetics and bio-whatever," Raven said with heavy sarcasm whenever Charles brought up the possibility that their writing group might be more accurately called a drinking group. Knowledge of exactly what went on _after_ sessions and panels were over, which most people called "networking" in order to justify it on their expense reports, kept him from pressing the point.

He knew, or assumed he knew, what they all wrote – Darwin some kind of bizarre poststructuralist poetry, Sean was planning on becoming the next Kerouac, Angel "poetic nonfiction," and Alex some terrifyingly long novel about prison. Raven wrote "a little bit of everything," as she liked to say. She could take on any style you asked of her – the rawness of Pahalniuk, Auden's liquid prose or the sparseness of a Chandler, the precise and devastating sarcasm of Austen – and reproduce it so accurately you'd think you were reading some previously unknown, just-discovered work. _You should find your own voice_ , her professors said, and, Raven told him, that was harder than it sounded.

"You'll find it," he'd said, one of the few times they'd talked about it, when they'd both been drunk and trying to negotiate mercurial, unfathomable Raven had been easier than usual. "You'll find it, don't worry, and you'll be brilliant. I'll buy all your books."

"You'd better." Raven had hiccupped solemnly and then passed out on his shoulder.

She did, he thought as he contemplated the molding above his head, need to find her own way. He couldn't keep back the twinge of shameful, brotherly selfishness, but she was almost all he had – or, at least, all he had in the way of someone who understood him.

Somewhere between working out how to be more of a supportive brother and less of a jerk, and telling himself he was _not_ going to obsess over good-looking antiques dealers, Charles drifted into reverie. Usually this was a helpful state, his mind open to the vibrations and influences of the world (as Raven had put it during her short-lived Zen phase), and he could work through problems in his research, small but knotty issues he worried at in the back of his mind. All he came up with today, before the door chimes announced the arrival of the drinking group, was the decision to go back to town the following day.

Raven would approve, he told himself, and really, he _did_ need to get out more often.

* * *

According to the sign in the window, Old Things opened at nine in the morning.

According to Erik, still exhausted and reeling from yesterday – _crowds crowds crowds jesus why are all these people here keep an eye out where's Moira why do people buy this shit seriously_ – Old Things opened when he felt mentally capable of coping with it. This meant somewhere closer to the vicinity of ten, after a severely overpriced double espresso from the café across the street and a pastry so expensive and tasteless Erik thought he might as well just eat his goddamn money.

"You could make yourself useful and go grocery shopping," he suggested to Moira, who was even now lumbering slowly in from the back room, carrying a cardboard box Erik pointedly refused to volunteer to help with.

Moira dropped the box of crap ( _antiques, Max, they're antiques_ ) and scowled. When she wiped a hand across her forehead, she left behind a smear of dust-sweat-dirt. The scowl deepened. "I _am_ making myself useful," she said, this time wiping her hand on her jeans, "by making sure you don't cock this up completely."

"Like you're in a place to make accusations," Erik snapped. He thought, reflexively, of the photograph in his apartment upstairs, the one hidden behind an innocuous picture of a waterfall.

"If you're going to be here, if you're going to _support yourself_ ," Moira ignored the dig; Erik knew she'd make him pay for it later, "you're going to have to learn at least a little bit about the trade. So I got you these." She gestured to the box.

Suspiciously, Erik toed the box lid open.

" _An Appraiser's Guide to Arts and Crafts Furniture_ ," he read, voice and mind slack with disbelief. He knelt to pick the book up and, to confirm his fears, look at the one underneath it. " _The 2011 Classic Quilt Handbook_ , _Antiques Antics! Find Buried Treasure in Your Own Home!_ " He stood again; having Moira looming over him was far too disconcerting. "You have got to be shitting me."

"Nope." Moira nudged the box closer to him. "I'm not suggesting you actually learn to _appraise_ things, just that if people bring something in, you know whether or not to buy it, and for how much. It'll also mean I don't have to spend all _my_ time and energy running all over the state, looking for stuff to sell."

"This is revenge, isn't it, for that time in South Dakota."

"No, this is _me_ telling _you_ if you want to be here, there are conditions." Her feet sounded lightly on the floorboards, barely a creak in the old wood, as she ghosted up to the front door to turn the lock. It went with the thud of old-fashioned steel, the tumblers thumping into place.

"South Dakota was _not_ my fault," Erik informed her, "and I had nothing to do with it."

"Yes, I'm sure Quested managed to drive his car into the middle of Stone Lake all by himself."

"Stranger things have happened."

Moira let the silence speak for her. Unrepentant, Erik slid behind the desk and made a show of setting up the cash register. It really _was_ a show; he hated the thing, which resisted every vicious jab to its buttons and every curse and merely beeped complacently at him. Moira rolled her eyes and vanished into the back.

"I'm leaving," she called, the warning punctuated by the scrape of her keys. "I have actual work I need to do for the next couple of days; Levine'll be across the street in that b&b, if you need him."

"Delightful," Erik muttered, more than half-distracted by the cash register. Distantly, he heard the rear door open and shut, and the sound of the three heavy locks sliding home.

Reinforced steel in the door, Erik thought. He gave up on the cash register and looked around the room, a small and creaky space filled with whatever Moira and Levine could get their hands on. Above was his apartment, equally small and creaky and dreary, its one window paned with bullet-proof glass and its door housed in the same steel frame that housed the front and rear doors on the ground floor. He wondered, as he picked up the box of books with the vague intention of arranging them behind the counter, if Moira would spring for some kind of part-time help to dust the place and make it look like someone actually gave a damn. Accuracy and precision, he thought; if he was going to do this, he ought to do it right, and make it look like a proper store. _His_ store.

Or, he supposed, Max Eisenhardt's store, given that Erik Lehnsherr was supposed to have died in the explosion that killed his family.

Erik Lehnsherr probably should have died long before that, but luck had been with him until that day, and that day had been as if someone had shot a hole in whatever it was that held his luck, and it had all spilled out like water, like blood.

The cowbell hung in the front door clanged discordantly. Erik jumped, spinning on his heel, reached for the .38 tucked up under the counter.

"Sorry I startled you!" said the sun-visored old lady with a smile. "Not much business this morning?"

"We opened late." Erik heard the words through the lighting-rush-haze of adrenaline. Reluctantly, he let go of the grip, fingers sweaty against the metal and rubber. His heart knocked hard against his rib cage, once, twice, before he could take a breath deep enough to calm it down. "My apologies."

"No difficulty," the lady said with the same cheerfulness. "Do you have any porcelain cows?"

"Um. Let me see." The _stuff_ , why the hell did Moira buy so much _stuff_ ; there was an order, something she had devised and told him to memorize as quickly as possible. He went over the store layout in his head, as he maneuvered through the maze of curios, side tables, and display cases. _There_ , animal figures and toys in the corner, under the old, faded poster of a dancing cat.

"If there's anything in particular you're looking for…?"

"No, no, just browsing." The lady beamed at him and patted his arm. "So polite, thank you, young man."

Erik had not, for the better part of ten years, felt young, not in the least bit. He supposed, to someone who wore a _Greatest Grandma Ever!_ sweatshirt (and who knew, she might well be), thirty-three was, in fact, ridiculously young. Slightly bemused by the thought, he retreated to the safety behind the counter, and watched the fluffy white head as the woman pored over the selection.

The cowbell clanged a few more times, once when the lady bought two cows and twice more as window-shoppers wandered in and out without buying anything. At least, Erik told himself as he prepared for immense and crushing boredom, it didn't look as though he'd have to relive the nightmare of yesterday, a bedlam of privileged people spilling their impatience and discontent all over the place and asking him impossible questions.

He settled in to read a book he'd taken off the shelves in the back, something called _The Nazi Hunter_ , which (he assumed) would be exactly what it said on the tin. Halfway through the first chapter, the cowbell rang again. The customer _this_ time wanted records – "Like, vinyl, man, you know – the good stuff," and Erik said something about how he knew what records were, _back in his day_ they actually did still exist and were listened to by people who didn't think listening to records made them cooler. The kid selected some Creedence and Marley in abashed silence and fled.

"That went well," Erik congratulated himself, and was considering celebrating his successful morning by buying lunch – he'd made a sign saying, no exceptions, the place would be closed between one and two (and Moira be damned, but he didn't write that) – when the cowbell clamored for his attention. He ignored it in favor of hunting around for take-out menus.

"Hello," the customer said. The floorboards creaked softly as he moved further in, or as though he were shifting from foot to foot.

A thread of familiarity in the voice teased at him, knotted itself around his attention and drew it, inexorably, gently, to itself. He looked up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the lovely kudos and comments so far!


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter three**

Raven, who had probably written the definitive work on Charles Francis Xavier and kept it stashed somewhere in the event she needed it for blackmail material, frequently observed that Charles could talk to anybody. He _would_ talk to anybody, given the chance, and even more bizarrely as far as Raven was concerned, people wanted to talk to _him_.

"Misanthropes want to talk to you!" Raven would say, whenever he'd needed an hour to leave a party because he'd just seen someone, or someone had just seen him, and he needed to say hello. "People who have been in decades-long comas wake up to talk to you! I bet if you went out into the forest" – that was what she called the parkland behind the house, Great-Great-Grandfather Xavier's hunting preserve (apparently, he'd had lions, and a baboon) – "seriously, _don't laugh_ , Charles! If you went out there you'd get all the woodland creatures to talk to you, like in Disney."

"It helps with persuading people to give me money for my work," Charles said now, as the concluding bit of his explanation as to why he had just spent five minutes talking at the antiques shop counter guy. "Also, it helps embarrass me very thoroughly when I'm drunk. And it annoys Raven."

He got an "I can tell" and a dry smile for his reply. "It's very true," Charles persisted. "You would be amazed at how little the wheels of science are greased by _actual_ science. It's all in who you know, it seems like, these days. And who you can persuade to give you ridiculous amounts of money, since the way grants are awarded… Well." It was an effort to stop; the vagaries of the NIH and the federal grant application process was probably not something the antiques shop counter guy wanted to hear about.

"I'm sure it's very aggravating," the antiques shop counter guy said neutrally as he toyed with a battered Rubik's cube. His fingers were long and dexterous, wrists twisting delicately as he looked for the correct way to line the layers up, and – until he realized he, and not the cube, was the object of the antiques shop counter guy's scrutiny – Charles watched this with a profound appreciation.

"You know," Charles said, undeterred as always by the other party's reticence, "it's extremely inconvenient for me to keep calling you 'the antiques shop counter guy,' even in my head." He offered his own name, "Charles – Charles Xavier," and then his hand, which was regarded with momentary suspicion before the antiques shop counter guy – "Max," the antiques shop counter guy, now named Max, said – accepted it and enclosed it in a warm and powerful grip.

"Max? So was that you, who had the copy of _Ulysses_ I bought?" At Max's blank look, Charles explained about the _ex libris_ sticker, and M. MacTaggert.

"Oh, no. No, no, _no_ , that's not me," Max said. His expression darkened into something dangerous. "That's my partner."

"Ah." Charles told himself that his heart absolutely was _not_ sinking; Max, however, had probably caught the expression on his face, because he quickly added, "My business partner, I mean," and Charles felt the world start to turn again.

Without the hordes of customers, he got a better view of the place, congested as it was with dust and smelling of other people's attics instead of perfume. The air conditioner moaned quietly, and other than that and the soft click of the squares of the Rubik's cube clicking into place, the strange, almost palpable presence of Max filling the air between them, the silence was complete.

"Is there any particular reason why you came back?" Max asked as he tossed the half-solved cube at Charles, who caught it reflexively. The barely-there smile crept back into the edges of his mouth; it made him almost approachable – not soft, precisely, but more welcoming, someone who might not mind being known. "You ran out of people to talk to?"

"As a matter of fact, I came back to save the rest of your books from death by mildew," Charles informed him. He turned the cube absently, fingers sliding across the smooth, worn surface of the plastic. "Even terrible pulp novels deserve a better fate than that back room of yours."

"The setup was not my idea," Max said. The look he directed at the shop, dark and considering, suggested none of this was his idea. "Some changes need to be made."

"Then that should be one of them," Charles said firmly. "You have some nice volumes in there, you know, and it would be a shame for anything to happen to them."

"So you're a bibliophile," Max said, the amusement clearer this time. "Are you interested in expanding your collection of vintage gay erotica?"

"I'll have you know, I had a very difficult time putting that book down last night." It had been shamefully true, because the writing had been decent (and sufficiently vivid in certain places) and possibly because the cover had been sticky, which Charles was not going to think about. "For being… what it is, it's quite well written. Unfortunately, it's only the second book, though; apparently the first one concerns how the two main characters meet. There are references to a road trip." He allowed himself a sly smile, the one that drove Raven crazy because it _worked_ , ridiculous as it was. "Seedy motels, too many martinis, and so on."

"Fascinating," Max said dryly. He slid off his stool, an effortless and hypnotic shift of muscle. Max moved with a careless sort of confidence, the kind Charles associated with athletes or dancers, all control and smoothness moving under the fabric of his shirt. Max picked something up, a piece of paper Charles hadn't noticed (because, he thought, he'd been too busy noticing Max, with his reddish hair and the graceful unfurling of his body and _calm down, Charles_ ), but now he did, because Max was playing with a corner of it, dog-earing it and glancing up at the door.

Craning his head, Charles read the words from almost upside-down.

"Oh," he felt the blushing come on, "I'm keeping you from your lunch, I am _so_ terribly sorry about that."

"You are," Max agreed. "Keeping me from my lunch, I mean."

"Then," Charles, caught up in the strangeness and the impulse of the moment, said, "the least I could do is take you out. If you're new here – are you new here? – if you're new, you probably don't know the best places to eat, and so many places here rip you off, only because it's somewhat touristy in that posh yuppie sort of way, and Americans are awful and pretentious about charging fifteen dollars for a parma ham and cheese sandwich."

"I think there was an invitation in there somewhere," Max said.

"There certainly was," Charles confirmed, and before Max could do anything, appropriated a piece of cellophane tape and, marching to the front door, affixed the sign to it. "I can see to your books later."

* * *

One o'clock to two o'clock turned into one o'clock to… some time in the afternoon. Erik thought about checking his watch, and decided he didn't care.

There were Rules to his life now, he knew. He'd had them read to him, lectured to him, shouted to him, and once, very literally, beaten into him, when he'd returned from a five-day trip (five days he'd told his employer he was sick) to see about Janos Quested. _Your old life isn't your life anymore_ , Moira had said, low and furious, as she'd slapped some Neosporin on the fresh cut on Erik's forehead, the cut _she'd_ given him, _Your old life isn't your life, and you don't exist._ Along with that came a host of other Rules, and some of them he'd lived by, but it was one thing choosing them for yourself and another to have them foisted on you, and Erik Lehnsherr – and fuck Moira, he would never think of himself as Max Eisenhardt, no matter how many years she forced him to stay trapped in this hell of another man's life – didn't suffer the latter very gladly.

The Rules also had to do with keeping himself to himself, not drawing attention, not making any connections with other people whatsoever. Those had been easy, because Erik Lehnsherr had made his own rules regarding keeping himself to himself, not drawing attention, and (especially) not making connections with other people. Other people generally weren't worth the effort, and those who might be worth the effort could get you hurt, or killed – or worse, _they_ could get hurt and killed, and really, it was better and safer for all involved for Erik to not know anyone.

He wondered if Moira had contingency plans in place for people like Charles Xavier, who were _determined_ to know him, and be known, and effortlessly breezed through the roadblocks of hostility and misanthropy Erik had built around himself over the past thirty-three years.

"Forgive my saying so," Charles was saying, open and guileless and so utterly without tact Erik wanted to laugh, "but you don't look very much like the sort of person who sells antiques. Or, at least, the sort of person who _enjoys_ it."

"Probably because I'm not. It's a… a family thing." Jesus, the man wasn't his damned therapist, or his priest. "I needed to come back here for the foreseeable future, and my – my partner had this business. And here I am."

"I see," Charles said faintly, and buried his confusion in his tea. "So you aren't actually an antiques specialist?"

"I'm more familiar with modern German painting," Erik said, even though _more familiar_ equated to _I had to know about the German Expressionists once_ , "and I don't really understand why people want to fill up their houses with other people's crap on the off chance it might be worth something some day."

"I've never understood that either." Charles beamed at him as though Erik's announcement had confirmed the existence of a profound, spiritual bond between the two of them, and Erik suddenly, irrationally, on the strength only of that fucking smile _ached_ to tell Charles everything, the whole and improbable story.

He tried to work out how long it had been, because it was one thing to know intellectually that it had been eight years since his life had started to go to hell, when he'd been twenty-five and an idiot, and another thing to _know_ that it hadn't been ten times that long. And the hell of it was (and he wanted to tell Charles this, Jesus Christ what was wrong with him), for the past perilous hour he'd almost felt normal. They'd been _chatting_ , for God's sake, getting-to-know-you chatter, like Erik wasn't going to pick up at the first sign of being able to end all this, and just leave.

As far as Charles was concerned, Erik was planning on staying forever. _Max_ was planning on staying forever, selling terrible antiques and being surly to his customers. Erik tried to study Charles without being too obvious about it, and imagined Charles – from the gestures, the hopeful light in those blue eyes, the enthusiasm and all of it – was constructing some kind of future where they were actually friends.

"… and, I know it's awkward, but I would of course pay you whatever your – Max?"

Fingers on his wrist, and Erik jumped, startled back to himself and the bright serenity of the day. Charles was looking at him, _in_ him, his expression terrifyingly earnest and worried – worried for _him_ , something with which Erik had not been familiar for a very long time. All around them the day and the town turned on, utterly ordinary, the sun high and bright in the clarity of the sky and making all the colors jump – a woman's red dress, the blue awning of a bank across the street, the green grass.

"I'm _so_ sorry," Charles was saying, "it was terribly rude of me, and very clumsy. I promise, I don't usually do – "

"No, I'm sorry." Erik wasn't used to apologizing, either. "My thoughts wandered. You were saying?"

"Oh." Charles's smile came back, full force. Erik, still struggling to catch up, missed the grab for the check; Charles had it neatly in hand, credit card tucked into the leatherette folder. "I was just saying," Charles said as he handed the folder back to the waitress (another stunning smile, God, he was in trouble), "even though modern art is your forte, perhaps you could come by my place some time and look at some pieces for me? One of my ancestors was something of a collector, but I'm afraid I don't have an eye for it."

He would never hear the end of it, Erik knew, if he said yes. Actually, he _would_ hear the end of it, because Moira would kill him. Only Moira wasn't here now, was she, off screwing up someone else's life, and damn her and the Rules anyhow.

"I would love to," Erik said. And, because this was getting too dangerous too fast and he needed space, said, "In the meantime, I do need to get back."

"Splendid!" Charles actually clapped his hands. "I'm rather at loose ends, with my lab closed, so my schedule is open. Whenever is most convenient for you, then." He scribbled something on a napkin. Erik, after accepting it in stunned silence, saw an address and phone number, with CX circled up at the top.

Next to the brightness of the day and Charles, the shop was dim, quiet when he unlocked the door and stepped inside. Bored already, and resigned to turning over his conversation with Charles for the rest of the day, he pulled out a notepad and pencil and began to sketch ideas for the shop. _Precision and accuracy_ , he told himself. _If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right._

He wasn't wholly surprised, or even at all surprised, when the first person through the door after Charles left was Levine. He also wasn't surprised to see Levine looking the way he always looked: _obvious_ , uncomfortable in jeans and light windbreaker, hair smoothed over the balding patch at the back of his head and sunglasses on even inside. Not for the first time, Erik wondered how it was someone like Moira, so effortlessly confident, worked with someone who was so good at being inconspicuous that he might as well wear a sign saying _FEDERAL AGENT_ in goddamn neon and flashing lights.

"Eisenhardt," Levine said, very _Miami Vice_ about it.

"A pleasure," Erik said coolly, "as always. What can I do for you?"

"We need to talk," said Levine.

"Of course we do."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone for commenting and kudos'ing! I wasn't planning on getting around to the next chapter for a couple of days, but the ideas were there and demanded to be written, so there you go.

**Chapter four**

Predictably, Charles's life became difficult the second Raven found out about Max – specifically, that Max was the reason Charles had gone back to town on Sunday and had come back empty-handed. She had needed about five minutes to extract the truth from him, because Raven knew exactly what to do and say to make him crack. It was a combination of being his sister and also having read up on police interrogation techniques, Charles thought to himself, and resigned himself to torment.

He found himself dropped into a new circle of Hell the following day when Max called. Raven, damn her _forever_ , had answered, and had only hung up when Max, exasperated by Raven's repeated demands to know who was the best sister in the 'verse, had done so. Charles hunched over his office phone like a vulture, and cursed his idiocy for not giving Max his cell number, until it rang again. He swooped on it and pretended to ignore Raven listening in as he and Max set up the day and time for him to come out.

Tuesday evening, six o'clock. The shop closed at five – not that Charles had been paying extremely close attention – and he figured it wouldn't be difficult to persuade Max to stay to dinner after a day spent fending off bored housewives.

Then again, there was Raven to consider, Raven who hovered like her namesake over his shoulder as he tried to get ready for his completely, totally, utterly, and in all ways professional and impersonal business meeting with Max Eisenhardt.

"I don't mock you whenever you pretend you're interested in my work so you can spend time with Hank." Charles gave up on trying to straighten his hair and settled for glowering at his sister's reflection. Raven leered unrepentantly back. "What are you doing in _my_ bathroom anyway?"

"Mocking you, obviously," Raven said. "And anyway, 'I'd like you to come appraise my family's dusty old paintings, even though you're not an expert'? _What_ about that isn't mockable?" She tried – not very hard, in Charles's estimation – to keep the laughter out of her voice. It crept in, slowly and inevitably, teasing the pitch of her voice higher, and he knew, he _knew_ , it was only a matter of time before the laughter started outright. Again. Charles scowled, and Raven snorted helplessly and cried, her voice strung tight with hilarity, "Yes! Yes! Oh, big strong fan of German Expressionism, assess my Rubens!"

"You are so hilarious, I may die," Charles said sourly. "Whatever happened to 'Charles, you need to get out more'? 'Charles, I don't want to see you die old, sad, and alone'? If this is what I get for trying to have a social life, I may have to become a hermit and go live in the park."

"Just because you took my advice doesn't mean I don't get to make fun of you." Raven flung her arms around his shoulders, not difficult considering their respective heights. Charles, not at all sulkily, allowed the embrace, Raven and her tumbling mass of blond hair and her faint perfume pressed close. "But I _am_ happy for you, Charles, even if this is right out of a romantic comedy – you know, with the workaholic who meets the quirky, off-beat shop owner who shows him the true meaning of love and stuff."

"I thought those were supposed to be intolerably bourgeois and you weren't supposed to know anything about them." Raven's reflection laughed back at him and kissed him on the cheek, uncomplicated, the way things rarely were between them these days. "Anyway," Charles added with a sigh, "I don't have the feeling that he's quirky and off-beat. At least, not like that."

"Your feelings again," Raven sighed. She stepped back a little and turned him, fingers going to his collar to straighten – no, not straighten, unbutton the top two buttons. "It's kind of amazing that you have all these _feelings_ about people and you're so good with them, but me and Hank are the only two people you actually like."

"My 'feelings' are right more often than not." Charles fought, and lost, the battle to button his shirt back up. "It's _sexy_ , Charles," Raven huffed with exasperation, "let me see your cuffs," and Charles submitted to having his cuffs unbuttoned and rolled up, too. "He's a good person," he told the top of Raven's head. "Only he's rather… different. Very different."

"I hope you don't mean, like, serial-killer different."

"No, nothing like that. He certainly doesn't belong here, though."

"Thank you, Dr. Psychic Hotline."

Charles ignored the remark and considered Max for a moment, how that _out-of-placedness_ had run deeper than Max's not liking the fact that he ran an antiques store for a living. Square peg, round hole, marching to the beat of a different drum and all that; Charles remembered, with an excruciating vividness, guiding Max to the best café in walking distance, power harnessed to a long, loping stride, tension threaded through his muscles despite the two of them being in one of the safest, most boring towns in the nation, despite it being broad sunlight and an ordinary June day.

"Do we need to lock up the silver?" Raven had moved on, into Charles's bedroom and then his closet. A pair of jeans came sailing out. "Charles, corduroys are _not_ first date material."

"He's coming out to look at paintings," Charles said feebly, clutching the jeans as if for dear life, "And I look ridiculous in these."

"If I weren't your sister," Raven said as she stalked out of the closet, "I'd say you look hot in them. Now, I'm going to see how Hank's getting on with your literature review, so put those on," with an emphatic gesture at the jeans, " _don't_ try to fix your hair, and keep those buttons unbuttoned. And give me some warning if he's spending the night, there are some things I never want to hear or see again in my life."

"It's somewhat disturbing, you know, having my little sister for a yenta."

"Seriously, I _am_ glad." Raven wrapped him up in another hug, tight enough to make him squeak. "You're all work and no play these days, and I know I'm not much fun to live with," she continued, at which Charles tried to protest, but she kept on, "So while I will tease the hell out of you every chance I get, I'm happy you're seeing someone, even if he's seeing our stupid paintings."

"And if he hurts me, you'll carve his heart out with a spoon," Charles said to the crazy, pale fall of her hair.

"Just to start with," Raven agreed.

* * *

Charles had been very pleased when Erik had insisted on meeting Tuesday, rather than waiting until later in the week. If he hadn't been so happy about it – _Marvelous, absolutely marvelous_ , and unlike most people, Charles really did seem to mean it – Erik would have worried about coming off as desperate or unprofessional. If he was desperate, it was mostly to get in at least one visit, some time pretending to be a normal human being, before Moira returned from her trip.

Levine was no Moira, but thinking about him still made Erik want to strangle the steering wheel with irritation. Doubtless he'd been in contact with Moira, letting her know about their charge's recklessness and irresponsibility – he could almost hear Levine saying _He's endangering the case, Moira, you need to get back here_ in that peculiar, nasal whine of his – and it was only a matter of time before Erik got to experience her wrath in person.

When he turned onto Graymalkin Lane, Erik double-checked the napkin to make sure he had the right address and that it hadn't gotten smudged, or that he hadn't hallucinated the street direction altogether. While everyone in Salem was filthy rich – old-money people comfortable with wealth and used to its privileges, a different sort of intolerable than the _nouveau riche_ Erik had found in Shaw – the scattered mansions, retiring on the vast skirts of their lawns, were a different magnitude of rich altogether. A spike of intimidation and uncertainty, a sensation to which Erik was unaccustomed and which was therefore deeply unwelcome, worked its way in under his ribs, his breath going tight, adrenaline starting to ooze slowly through him.

Not for the first time, Erik thought that this was an extremely bad idea.

Moira would have a hell of a lot to say, more than Levine had managed in their conversation on Saturday – it had amounted to Erik suggesting Levine go fuck himself, and when Levine had actually tried to _threaten_ him, and said "You know what we can take away from you, Eisenhardt," Erik had looked at him calmly and said, "And you know what you can lose," and that had been that.

1407 Graymalkin Lane, or rather the gate to it, loomed up on the right. Erik half-expected to see guards in red coats and furred black caps flanking it and carrying sabers, but all he found was an intercom with a button, and on the other end of the intercom, a tinny voice that asked suspiciously about his business. The suspicion faded when Erik introduced himself and his appointment, and the gate rolled cooperatively back, opening onto long, rolling hills dotted by congregations of ash, beech, and oak. Of course the house would be set comfortably back from the main road, Erik thought, as much or more an announcement of wealth – _we have so much money we don't need to flaunt it_ – than displaying it on the sidewalk.

He'd done his research – contrary to what Moira liked to say, he wasn't an idiot – and Dr. Charles Francis Xavier appeared to be as advertised: professor of genetics and biophysics at Columbia University and one of the youngest full professors on record at thirty-one, whose search results consisted primarily of press releases for one discovery or another and citations to research journals, an entry on something called HotProf Dot Com that Erik had decided would be beneath his dignity to investigate. Unlike the moneyed scions who populated the pages of the tabloids (Erik also discovered in a related search that the Xaviers were not just rich but _obscenely_ rich, from back in the family's first days), Charles stayed away from anything that might so much as brush the limelight. If Charles had anything nefarious going on in his life, even so much as a parking ticket, not a word of it had been breathed online.

This was, Erik reflected as he pulled up in front of the mansion, becoming an even worse idea by the second. He studied the exterior of the house – immense, really, was the word for it, a piece of Ye Olde Englande transplanted to the United States and surrounded by box hedges and nature manicured into submission – and contemplated climbing back in the car, turning around, and leaving New York altogether.

"Ah, Max, it's lovely to see you!"

Erik spun, catching the sound of footsteps on gravel a heartbeat after Charles's voice.

Charles was advancing on him, unfairly and attractively mussed in jeans and sloppily-buttoned shirt, a far, far cry from the past two times Erik had seen him, where his clothes had suggested he'd mugged an octogenarian, or possibly gone back in time to 1958 and done all his shopping then. He shook Erik's hand – a firm grip; there was something sturdy and _dependable_ to him that Erik couldn't identify, but that invited confidence.

"I thought," Charles said with elaborate casualness, withdrawing into himself somewhat, "if you had to come directly from the shop, you'd be hungry. We could have dinner first before we get started, if you've the time."

"Sounds good," Erik said, only half-aware of what he was agreeing to.

"Wonderful!" Charles offered him another blinding smile, and once again, Erik wanted desperately to tell him everything Charles knew about him was a complete lie. _My name is Erik Lehnsherr_ , he thought fiercely, as if he could somehow push his name into Charles's skull. He couldn't, though, and Charles merely turned and gestured for Erik to follow him, and said something about how they would eat in the kitchen, as the formal dining room was rarely used.

The interior of the mansion was dim against the light of the summer evening. After his eyes adjusted, Erik tried to gape as politely as possible and said something offhand about how Charles must have suffered cruelly, growing up in such a place. Charles laughed, delighted, and said growing up with such deprivation had been hard, but he'd survived.

"Doubtless scarred for life," Erik said as they ambled by a Grecian urn and, hung over that, the portrait of a long-dead Xavier.

"Permanently so," Charles said, and the smile he offered Erik said he got the joke and didn't take offense.

"Why do you work, then?" Erik gestured to the mahogany paneling, the marble. "I imagine most people would be happy to live off their trust fund."

"What would be the point of that?" Charles asked, sounding honestly confused.

Erik thought of Shaw's houses scattered across the world, the gigantic boat in Miami (where he'd come close, _so close_ , he ached thinking about it), the submarine. He'd known wealth as a means to an end, for Shaw had enough money to buy and pay for anyone's life. Erik had had a price tag, the same as anyone, and Shaw had paid it with a smirk. He remembered the villa in Argentina, heart in his throat and counting down the seconds until he could free himself, standing in the salon with Shaw and the others, almost blinded by the light of crystal, diamond, and chrome, sipping Krug 1928 and trying to swallow past the bitterness.

He'd been wearing something Shaw had given him that night, a bespoke suit from some exclusive shop in Paris, and the dirt on the hillside and the blood had ground into the fabric and never come out.

Mechanically, he followed Charles into the kitchen, a space that, utilitarian as it was, was still the size of his apartment over the shop. Pictures and clippings adorned the refrigerator – drink recipes, Erik saw with amusement, and some pictures of an exuberant-looking Charles with a blonde wrapped around his shoulders, some of the blonde and other young, energetic people grinning like maniacs. And on the wooden table in the center of the room…

"Take out?" The laugh was startled out of him.

"Sorry." Charles offered him a plate and a rueful grin. "I'm actually not here most of the year – I have a flat down in the city close to campus, you see, so we don't have a cook or anything. My talents lie in places other than the kitchen, and Raven did go through a culinary phase when she was eighteen or so, but we don't talk about that."

"Ah." Erik had not yet laid eyes on the redoubtable younger sister.

"I believe the phrase is 'weapons of mass destruction,'" Charles said gravely. "Do you like Chinese? I should have waited to see what you preferred, but I'm… I'm very bad at thinking about other people. I'm sorry."

"I lived off Chinese in college," Erik reassured him. Technically, it had been ramen – and technically, therefore, Japanese – until Magda had taught him how to do cooking that involved more than boiling water or picking up the phone. "This is fine."

"Oh, good," Charles said, ineffably pleased, "and you ought to pick, next time," and Erik's heart stuttered at the words, and the hint at some impossible future.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter five**

"It's a bit odd, eating in here," Charles explained as he fumbled with his chopsticks and an uncooperative piece of kung pao chicken. The half-empty bottle of red in the center of the table didn't seem to be helping. "Like I said," he continued, "I'm not here most times, and when I am I usually eat in my office."

"Hm," Max said, and whether it was the snow peas or because there really wasn't anything to say in response to Charles's explanation about the kitchen, Charles had no idea. Max swallowed, set his chopsticks down, and, after a pause in which he seemed far more absorbed in Charles than his food, said, "You're not quite what I expected."

"I'm pretty much what it says on the tin." Charles shrugged and fought the urge to look at something, anything, other than Max looking at him. "Academic, hopeless nerd, terrible fashion sense, shameful addiction to books and most forms of alcohol." Max snorted, and Charles laughed. "What were you expecting, anyway?"

"You know," Max said slowly, "I'm not entirely sure."

"I can be a pretentious and sanctimonious jackass sometimes," Charles offered, "although I do try not to be."

It was Max's turn to laugh, a quick, startled sound that took him over – his shoulders quivering, spine bending into it, and his face _transformed_. Charles couldn't stop the rush of warmth, or the sudden, helpless conviction that he wanted to see Max like this more often. Max settled, drawing almost wholly back into his habitual reserve, and the laughter melted down into a soft smile. His gaze rested on Charles with a contented sort of softness, lingering a moment before being redirected to his plate.

When he began to eat again, it was with the efficiency Charles had come to associate with him, fingers curved neatly around his chopsticks and manipulating them with a competence that Charles decided he could watch forever. Like he did in the antiques shop, the café, and all the rest of the polished setting of Salem Center, Max stood out, strange against the ordinariness of Charles's kitchen.

"I can hear you thinking from here," Max said, dry and amused, He smiled lazily up at Charles, eyes teasing under their lids. When he drank, there was a purposefulness to it, as though the slide of wine down his throat, the curve of his mouth around the glass, were a statement Charles was meant to decipher, or understand immediately. "Why," Max said when he'd finished his glass, "don't you tell me a bit about your collection?"

Not without some relief, Charles latched onto the reason he'd asked Max out here in the first place. _The reason you tell yourself you asked Max out here in the first place_ , said a voice in his head. It was not entirely unlike Raven, that voice, and how it was the same person could be the voice of reason _and_ the devil on one's shoulder, Charles had no idea.

"I don't really know much about the paintings," Charles said. "Mostly that a lot of them are large, old, from Europe, and if the people in them aren't wearing ermine or a suit of armor, they're naked and frolicking in a wood or something like that."

"That could describe the vast majority of the European tradition." Max chewed meditatively on a cashew, swallowed, and reached for his wine glass. "Do you know who the artists were? The workshops?"

"Men in ruffs and pointy mustaches, I imagine," Charles said, and Max laughed one of his odd, spontaneous laughs again, looking away as though ashamed to be caught at it. "Some of the very valuable ones are in museums. My great-grandfather couldn't bring himself to break up the collection, but there was too much to be kept here, and from what I understand some pieces were too delicate to be stored in the attics."

"So your book collecting is in the proud Xavier tradition of being a packrat." Max ran his fingers along the stem of his glass, and a bolt of warmth ran down Charles's spine, spread through his lungs and abdomen, and down and down.

"Raven says it's a congenital illness, but tradition sounds much nicer." Thoughtfully, he rearranged the rice and sauce still left on his plate. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"I don't know… anything beyond how much you dislike antiques and your customers. I could work out that you're not vegan from the sandwich you had the other day, but that's about it." Max's mouth had gone thin, something dangerous in his face that suggested pressing the issue wouldn't be welcome. Those sorts of things rarely deterred him, though, and he and he would have kept going with _some_ line of conversation, the painters Max preferred, what he liked on his pizza, anything, except for the abrupt and heartstopping blare of his phone, song sung by one of those dime-a-dozen pop stars, made even more obnoxious by the quality of the phone's speakers. Max snorted.

"Oh for god's sake," he grumbled, face heating at the grin on Max's face. "I am so sorry, that's Raven's ringtone, she did something mysterious with my phone – usually I'm good with technology, but she's bewitched it or something." He dove for the phone before it could continue its humiliating display any longer, considered simply turning it off (which he would do, he knew, if he weren't so immensely _annoyed_ ), but instead jammed down the 'answer' button and breathed a demand to know what Raven thought she was doing.

"I'm in my room, bored, and wondering how you're doing," Raven said blithely. "Do I need to rescue you? Or him?"

"You're calling me from the other side of the house." Even though she couldn't see it, Charles scowled. "Why not come here and talk to me in person like a normal human being?"

"Normal is boring," Raven answered, "and anyway, I don't want to actually see you being awkward and love-struck in person. I just wanted to know how it's going, and if I need to camp out here for the night."

"It's going," Charles hissed. He didn't have to look to know Max was listening in; all too clearly he could imagine Max leaning forward, elbows on the table, head inclined to catch the faintest, exasperated whisper of Charles's voice. Then, because two could play at this game and he'd already let Raven score far too many points already, added, "But you should stay in your room just in case. Max got soy sauce on his shirt and I've put it in the laundry, so he's very much half-naked and I have to tell you he doesn't seem to mind it. I don't."

"Oh god," Raven moaned. "Okay, okay, I'm hanging up."

"Half-naked, am I?" Max asked after Charles turned his phone off and tossed it back on the counter, and about a half-second before Charles realized what, exactly, he'd just said.

 _I wish_ , Charles thought fervently, and tried to drown his embarrassment in his wine glass.

* * *

Two glasses of wine had his body humming contentedly, looser, less aware of anything except the quiet of the house and Charles's benign presence. Charles's _interest_ , cautious but keen, and if he wanted it – if Erik wanted it, if he twined his fingers through Charles's, or ran them through Charles's soft brown hair, down the fine bones of his face, his neck, if he kissed him on that terribly pretty mouth of his – if he wanted it, Erik could have Charles take him to bed.

He was buzzed, not drunk, Erik told himself, and instead of tasting the sweet stretch of skin at Charles's nape, a hint above the line of his collar, asked for a drink of water and retreated back to the table while Charles stowed the leftovers in the refrigerator and the dishes in the sink. If it hadn't been for the wine and the stubborn _wantwantwant_ that cycled through Erik's bloodstream (and if it hadn't been for who Erik was and who Charles was, and the immense fucked-up situation surrounding them), it would have been domestic. Very carefully, Erik steered away from that thought and concentrated on his water.

They ended up in Charles's study, Charles having a distracted, half-vocalized idea of hunting down the catalog his great-aunt Charlotte had put together. "She was a great one for inventories," Charles explained as he led Erik on safari down another long hall and through a couple of empty rooms. "Her manifestation of the Xavier genetic quirk must have been to collect, well, collections of collections, I suppose."

"Do we need breadcrumbs?" Erik asked, and felt slightly foolish as they stepped into something that, a century ago, must have been a gentleman's retreat, with walls polished to a dark honey and carpets soft underfoot.

"Please make yourself comfortable," Charles said as he stepped over to a heavy desk, incongruous with its covering of photocopies and the sleek black laptop positioned atop the blotter. "I scanned Aunt Charlotte's inventory some time ago; I just need to remember where I put it."

Erik wondered briefly how one was supposed to get comfortable in this place, despite the deep-cushioned furniture and the light that, like the rest of the room, was soft and settled and old. Still, walking around to inspect the books seemed less awkward than hovering over Charles's shoulder while he dug up Aunt Charlotte's catalog, and there were a _lot_ of books to look at, arranged in some system that eluded Erik. Behind the desk, glass cabinets displayed the prizes of the collection, prizes for which Charles abandoned his search so he could tell Erik – _Max_ – about them.

He couldn't quite remember the last time he had been around someone so unapologetically enthusiastic, Charles's passion warming every word and the clean lines of his face as he talked and gestured his way through his collection. "A lot of this was here when I was a boy, of course," and he indicated some of the first editions, mostly of famous American and British authors, one first-edition _Moby-Dick_ , a manuscript copy of Tennyson's _Lady of Shalott_ and an illuminated medieval book in pride of place, its gold leaf rich in the downlights. "So much knowledge," Charles said, with a deep happiness that made Erik ache in ways he didn't dare examine too closely.

Anxious to get away from the attraction Charles was spinning with his hands and enthusiasm, he turned to the only other remarkable object in the room, the chess set placed between two immense leather chairs. Charles returned to his computer, distractedly tapping at the keys. Expectation there, Erik thought, and he wondered what it was Charles was seeing in him.

"This _is_ an antique," Erik said as he bent over the chessboard.

"One of the first Jaques sets." Charles abandoned the laptop and, hands in his pockets, walked over. "I don't know much about it."

Erik picked up the exquisite little black knight and turned it over; the gold embossing of the trademark glinted in the light, not much faded despite the hundred and sixty years between then and now. The knight and its fellow pieces had been done in ebony, his opponents in boxwood.

"My father taught me to play on this set." Charles smiled, eyes soft with memory. "Raven tried teething on one of the bishops." He picked up the white queen's bishop, distinguished from its brother by a few faint scars across its mitre. "Do you play?"

No way to miss the quickening of interest and hope in Charles's voice. "Not in years, but I used to."

"We could have a game, when – if you come out again," Charles said. "I've probably kept you too long as it is."

"Or," Erik said, despite the litany of _bad idea bad idea_ chanted in his head, "we could play now, and I could come back another time."

"That is a very excellent idea." Charles walked around to the other side of the board. "Do you prefer white or black? Guest's choice."

"White," Erik said decisively, and sat down.

Charles hovered for a moment before muttering "Just a tick," and darting over to a cabinet. Over his shoulder, he said, "This was not part of my formative chess education, but I've found it enhances play," which was mystifying until he unlocked the cabinet and pulled a bottle and two snifters from the shelf. Erik didn't need to look at the label to know it would be something extravagant and sublime; looking was only a confirmation. Inhaling the breath of the scotch was like heaven; the first sip was like nectar.

"I feel as though I should be in white tie and have a cigar," he said dryly. It won him one of Charles's self-deprecating smiles.

He opened play, pawn to e4. "Knight to f6," Charles said with solemn formality, fingers delicate on the ebony, and advanced the knight over the rank of pawns.

"So you prefer having the opening advantage; statistically, White is slightly more likely to win, assuming the players are evenly matched," Charles said as Erik studied the board and considered his options. Charles didn't strike him as the sort of person who would push for the offensive in the early stages; he would bide his time, wait for white's opening advantage over him to level out. "Are you a theorist?"

"Not as such." _I played this game with one of the people I hate most in the world._ The salon in Shaw's villa, antique wood and the harshness of track lighting, a sleek modern sofa with Emma Frost sitting across from him, rolling one of his rooks between manicured fingers. "I've played for some years, though." He advanced the pawn, e5.

Charles countered with the knight to d5. "Who taught you?"

"My… my mother." He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch, wanting the burn to cover other things.

Charles _was_ watching now, eyes liquid and knowing, like he'd somehow already excavated the truth Erik couldn't speak.

"It started after I had broken my leg, doing something I shouldn't have." _Riding my bike down the hill outside town; if you rode fast enough, it felt like you could fly._ He had been flying, at least after the bike's front tire had hit a stick or stone, and then he'd been airborne. A miracle he hadn't broken his neck, his mother had said, but I will wring it for you. "There wasn't much to do, and my father didn't care for the game, so my mother guilted me into learning it."

"But you liked it better than you told yourself you would."

He had. The knight was tempting; he moved another pawn forward, intent on capture. Charles moved the knight out of danger. "What about you? Your father taught you, but you must have kept up with it."

"The only way you could know much more about me would be if you got the lecture on Charles Francis Xavier from Raven," Charles said, instead of answering directly. Erik sensed the interest, latent in Charles leaning forward, the expectant tense of his shoulders, even if Charles was politely dividing his attention between the board and his drink.

"There isn't much to tell." _My real name is Erik Lehnsherr._ "I grew up in Wisconsin, this little town near Madison," _I was born in Germany, moved here when I was fourteen_ , "went to school for accounting but didn't want to make a career out of it," _I was an engineer, I was fucking doing something with my life_ "bounced around for a little while, and now I'm here." _I saw something I shouldn't have and my family paid the price, and the man who watched them die is going to die, and I'm going to be the one to make sure it happens._ "Here, selling antiques to people with more money than sense."

"I'm sure there's more to you than that," Charles said. He had rested his elbows on his knees and cradled the tumbler of Scotch in his fingers. Even though he seemed to be studying the board, working out – as Erik had just done – that unless Erik shored up his pawns Charles would have the game neatly in hand, Erik had the sense that Charles's mind was on other things. _In_ other things; he felt undressed, stripped bare (or near to it) under the knife of Charles's attention, the way it carved off layers and layers and brought – or Erik imagined it brought – everything hidden to light.

"There's nothing more," Erik said tightly. " _Nothing_."

Charles's silence spoke volumes. Skeptical volumes, Erik imagined, but Charles didn't press it and the conversation lapsed. He'd done enough damage for the night, though, _far_ too much, and Erik, knowing it would throw the game (and knowing Charles knew it), chased blindly after Charles's knight with another pawn. In three moves, Charles had neutralized the center he'd built up and gone on the attack; in ten more, Erik's queen was pinned and helpless, and two more after that, Charles announced checkmate.

With a wry smile and nod to acknowledge his defeat, Erik moved to tip over his own king.

Charles reached forward, hand over Erik's to stop him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! As I mentioned on a couple of the other fics, I've been distracted by various this past week or so, some good, some bad. Now, if my cold will let me, I can get back on track with the writing. I apologize if this is a bit shorter than the other parts; I just... I take _forever_ to write anything having to do with sex that isn't more complicated than "And then they kissed! The end." And if I didn't just barrel through it, this chapter would never be done.

**Chapter six**

Max's hand quivered under his.

"I'm sorry." His own voice rang hollow and strange in his ears. "I shouldn't have presumed."

"You shouldn't have," Max agreed. Charles waited for him to pull back, pull away, and for the moment to end, and half-prayed he'd do it soon. Max only lifted his fingers from the white king, awkward as it must have been for him to stay bent over, and stared at their hands, how Charles's fingers had settled into the valleys between his knuckles, pressing against the ridge of a vein.

"I'm very good at people," Charles said wryly, "until I'm suddenly very _bad_ at them. But I didn't mean to press, truly, I just... I wanted to know more about you." _Because you are the most compelling person I've met in so long, and I want to know you, I want you._ "Again, I'm sorry."

"You're forgiven." The words were dry, reluctant; the half-smile Max offered him was, somehow, more reassuring. Charles's hand still sat atop his, as though Max either welcomed the touch or was too surprised to do anything about it. Under Charles's, his hand was warm, rough; it felt capable.

Some terrible, tight thing eased in his chest, enough for him to disengage their hands and say, "Alekhine's Defense has a much smaller chance of working if White keeps his pawns from being weakened as they spread across the board."

"I'd underestimated you," Max admitted. When he leaned back in his chair, the white king stayed upright. "Black has to be aggressive on the attack for most versions of that defense to work."

"I thought you said you didn't study the game," Charles teased, before realizing that might be taken as fishing for more information.

"Only out of necessity, and I never did it formally." Some of the tension bled out of Max's shoulders, his spine molding itself to the soft leather of the chair again. "One of the few people who played with me was ruthless – not a master; he wasn't refined enough for that." He laughed, without humor. "Looking back on it, he wasn't terribly intelligent, only one of those people who was very good at getting others to go along with him." Max paused. " _Only_ ," he said again, with bitterness.

Charles had the sense of half-truths again, each word holding volumes within it, and bitterness. Max bit his lip, as if to keep the words back, and withdrew back into himself. Charles sat, vaguely aware of his glass of whiskey, abandoned and forming condensation rings on the tabletop, and trying to watch Max and not be obvious about it, and turning over what Max had said.

The sort of person Max had sketched for him – it went beyond chess; it was the sort of cruelty that infused an entire person like slow poison, and leached out. An infection, Charles supposed, something insidious and slow-working and fatal.

He replayed his few memories of Max, passing them under this new lens. Fingers tapping quickly at the board of the cash register, or cradling a pair of chopsticks; the startle when Charles had walked into the shop for the second time, _reaching_ for something; the shying away whenever Charles had tried to bring up the topics most people could talk endlessly about. _Something_ had happened, and knowing the field of human cruelty was vast, it could be any one of a thousand things, but it all came back to that mysterious _he_ , the chess player.

Charles couldn't see Max as the sort of person who suffered others gladly, especially not those who would hurt him, or even deflect him from what he wanted. _Who did this to you?_ He ached to ask the question. He could help Max; he had the money and intelligence, the influence if he ever wanted to exercise it. _Trust me, you need friends, I can help you_ , and that was something else he ached to say, and it took everything in him to hold it back.

 _You're good at people, until you're suddenly bad at them._ He'd quoted Raven's words earlier, of course; most of his knowledge of himself had come out of her frustration with him. _You're my brother, Charles, and I love you, but you need to keep your opinions to yourself some time, and not everyone is your fix-it project_.

"I'm glad you decided to play chess with me," he said, instead of the ten thousand other things clogged up in his throat.

For a moment, he thought Max hadn't heard him, lost in his contemplation of the board, or the past, or something else altogether. _What is it?_ he asked silently, and not for the first time wished he could actually read minds the way Raven claimed he did, now, when it was important. He wasn't entirely sure why it was so, only that it was, that he _had_ to decipher the furrow down the center of Max's forehead, the startling, intense pressure when Max looked up at him with those grey, grey eyes.

"Max?"

"Come here," Max said hoarsely.

Charles did, so fast he thought he should be ashamed of himself because looking that desperate wasn't seemly in the _least_. Any thoughts of playing it cool, if he had any, vanished in the white, lightning heat of Max's hands sliding around his hips, his breath harsh on Charles's face for the instant before Charles bent his head and kissed Max on the mouth.

 _God_ , Max said, or the choked-off first syllable of Charles's name, or nonsense, it didn't matter. Charles had his weight braced on his knees and the long, lovely stretch of Max's thighs ranged against him, his fingers laced in Max's hair and Max licking at him, sweet and fierce pressure to open up. He did, and it was all roughness and utterly careless, Max not minding when Charles eased the kiss long enough to snatch a breath, and when they dove back under, let Charles take charge of things. His mouth melted into generosity, soft at the edges and tasting a bit of the whiskey from earlier and perfect perfect _perfect_ all the way through.

Max's fingers, his clever, beautiful fingers, crept under Charles's shirt, thumb brushing across the ridged, dead patch of flesh (not _the old scar_ , only another), pausing to wonder over it before Charles grunted impatiently and hitched himself closer. He sighed when Max's hand molded itself to his hip, kneading the muscle there, "Hmmm right there," he muttered when a thumb hit the divot beneath his hipbone.

His body reminded him how long it had been, months of meetings-work-more-meetings and the research always coming first, no time, no _time_ , and the people he'd met nice enough for the most part, no one he wanted to lose himself in. _Now_ , though, his blood and hormones clamored at him, hungry for it, as hungry as Max seemed to be, Max who was running fingers along his forearms, electric on the skin of Charles's wrist. A callus pressed over a pulse point, lingering to feel the gallop-and-throb, and Charles felt the thunder of it clear up to his heart.

"Oh god," Charles managed to say, shaking his head against how good it was, "so good, so good."

Max breathed something Charles couldn't decipher, then, "Do you like that?" and Charles twisted up into him to emphasize how much he really, sincerely did like it. _I like it very much_ , he sighed when they had to stop kissing, his lips hot and swollen, sensitive when he ran his tongue across them. Max grinned and touched a finger to his lower lip, sting of salt where Max's stubble had rubbed the skin almost raw.

"That was quite nice," Charles said, nipping at Max's fingertip. Max's smile was wide and reckless, a fierce delight that ratcheted the fire in Charles's belly up a few degrees. He stretched carefully, felt the pull low in his back, and winced. "But do you think we could – " He slid off Max's lap and stood, off-balance with want and shaking with it.

Not much point in straightening himself up, but he tugged self-consciously at the hem of his shirt where Max's attentions had rucked it up.

When Max didn't say anything, he looked up and saw Max staring at him, thunderstruck and silent, and what he saw on Charles's face, Charles had no idea.

* * *

How they ended up on the couch, Erik couldn't say, only that his memory had blurred to kiss-touch-Charles-pulling-his-shirt-off-fumbling as Charles said something about his back and making themselves more comfortable, then kiss-reaching-stumbling-together as they tripped over their own feet and sudden clumsiness, and heat-pressure-slide-kissing-falling as the back of his knees had hit the edge of the couch and he'd had to defy physics to fall back without concussing himself. Laughter then, and some of that had been Charles (who was unabashed in his delight, and that made Erik all sorts of helpless), and some of that had been him.

The leather was smooth and rich under his back, cradling his shoulder blades where Charles's weight on his chest had pressed him down into the cushions. The designs his fingers traced across Erik's chest were abstract, arousing through the haze of satisfaction. His own fingers mapped out Charles's back, smooth and firm and the muscles beautifully responsive, skin sleek with sweat and perfect until Erik found a twisting ridge of tissue in the dip of Charles's spine. They lingered without Erik willing it, caught by the difference.

"Old war wound," Charles said blithely, without Erik asking. He shifted, though, so Erik's fingers slid away and settled beneath the point of his shoulder blade. After a moment, he offered, quieter this time, "Accident. My friend didn't make it."

"My mother and father died in a house fire," was all he could say to that. Even saying half the truth to someone who wasn't Moira lifted some of the weight, was more intimate than two naked bodies pressed together. "I couldn't save them."

"I'm sorry," Charles said. The sympathy he offered rankled for a moment before Erik realized he could accept it without bitterness.

"Of course." Charles sat up and untangled himself from Erik's legs. No longer pressed solidly up against him, Erik could see the sturdy, practical lines of Charles's body, the constellations of freckles decorating his shoulders and the back of his neck, the precise curve where neck flowed down into shoulder, and he had, suddenly, to kiss Charles there.

"You aren't leaving," Charles said mock-severely, not looking up from sorting out his shirt but leaning into Erik's mouth all the same.

"Maybe," Erik said, "I don't want to."

"Then don't," Charles said, simple as that.

He spared a thought for Levine, probably hyperventilating in his room in the bed-and-breakfast when Erik failed to reappear in the window of his flat above the shop. The thought dissolved when Charles stood up, shirt misbuttoned and trousers riding low on his hips.

"You're quite welcome to stay," Charles said, wariness and want running under the casualness.

"I'd like that," Erik said.

He followed Charles through the labyrinth of the house, past silently watching paintings and sculptures. Charles was a warm presence in the shadows, walking close enough for his fingers to brush against Erik's, enough to remind and encourage in a silence Erik didn't feel inclined to break and with which Charles seemed content. Up a set of stairs and down another hall, their feet soundless on the carpets, and Erik felt strangely young again, up to no good.

A light shone under a door further down the hallway. _Raven_ , Charles breathed, moving a little faster. They passed a few more doors, all shut with silence dwelling behind them, until they came to Charles's room. Charles pushed the door open and gestured Erik through, pausing to make sure they hadn't attracted his sister's attention.

"She's probably figured it out by now anyway," Charles said, and sighed as Erik found that hypnotic line of his shoulder and closed his mouth around it.

He turned, sleek and fluid, in the circle of Erik's arms and, twining together again, they kissed.

He, they, could do this all night, Erik thought hazily. Charles guided him through the dark room and its unfamiliar furniture, tugging at Erik's shirt again with an impatient noise. By the time they reached the bed, the room a blur of half-light and a desk and more bookcases, Charles had Erik's shirt off and was breathing soft, wondering sounds into Erik's chest.

The bed was immense, and Erik laughed – _lap of utter deprivation, is it?_ – and when Charles pushed irritably at him, he let himself be rolled over into soft blankets, and gave himself up to whatever Charles wanted, and pushing anxiously against Charles, exchanging kisses and learning the length and breadth of him, he heard nothing except the rush of Charles' breath and half-formed words, and the clear gallop of his heart in his ears.

Later, with Charles sleepily twisted around him and his smile pressed to the curve of Erik's shoulder, he realized it felt odd, to lie wrapped in another person, his mind empty of everything except simple human warmth and a deep ache that wasn't loss, or anger, or the weight he'd carried with him for years now. Distantly, he thought he should sleep, that he'd need to be up early to get to the shop and frame some kind of response to Levine's demands to know what he'd done, but as Charles snuffled and twitched beside him, they became the problems of another man, or of another time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, because this does pretend to be filling an actual prompt, they will actually be back in the antiques shop. Doing antiques things, quite possibly.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter seven**

Max stayed to breakfast.

"Instant oatmeal?" Max asked as he peeled and cut up a banana. The sideways smile he offered Charles was teasing, and held some of last night in it.

An interested sort of heat started to work its way down Charles's spine, but he managed to say something about how, given takeout last night, Max shouldn't have been surprised. Max's smile stretched into true amusement, and something like contentment. Hastily, Charles turned away to pull his bowl from the microwave.

"Good coffee," Max grunted around the lip of his mug.

"An art perfected over years of exams and sleeping in the lab," Charles said solemnly. "I don't think I would have been able to manage my dissertation without it."

Max slid into his chair at the table. In yesterday's clothes, he had the look of a man who was used to morning hours by habit, but not by choice; Charles remembered, with a sudden and aching clarity, the languid stretch of Max's body alongside his, fingers fumbling to turn the bedside clock so Max could see it. Max had huffed a breath against Charles's shoulder, and Charles had seen _6:18_ flashing in blue through the blurriness of sleep. _I need to get back to town_ , Max had mouthed the words into the skin of Charles's neck, and Charles had bargained for five more minutes, slow, licking kisses that had turned into Max rolling on top of him and then twenty more minutes of the two of them lazily working each other off.

He sat down in his own chair and prayed Max didn't have telepathy, or _eyes_ , because if he had either of those things he'd see Charles was at the edge of becoming undone at his own damn breakfast table. If Max noticed, he didn't say anything, and Charles fought for a few deep breaths and control, and tried to eat his oatmeal like a normal person who wasn't already wrapped up in and fascinated with someone else.

"My father had the strangest fondness for instant coffee," Max said as he studied his coffee mug. His expression seemed caught between meditative and surprised, a confession or memory startled out of him without his knowing why. "My mother said it was the one thing she never understood about him, but whenever we went shopping, she would buy some."

Charles refrained, barely, from chasing the subject any further. It was just as well, he supposed, for Max shook himself out of reminiscence with a scowl and devoted himself to his oatmeal. They ate for a few minutes in a silence that Charles fancied was contented, warm in the light filtering through the windows, Max loose in a way that he hadn't been last night, and Charles imagined – straight out of Raven's much-hated romantic comedies, he thought – an endless series of such moments, contentment and oatmeal forever.

So it was, of course, too good to last.

"I see _someone_ had a good night, at least."

Raven had materialized in the doorway, _of course_ , incongruous in the paneled mahogany and elegance of the hall in her patterned silk robe and a towel wrapped around her head. When she moved more fully into the light of the kitchen, Charles saw the towel wasn't patched but splotched here and there with a dirty red.

"Well, hello there," Raven drawled. She marched over to the coffee maker, so involved in pouring her own cup and stirring in her sugar she might as well have been staring openly.

"You're Raven," Max said, not that she could possibly be anyone else.

"And you're Max." Raven favored him with an assessing look. She caught his, and Charles's, questioning glance at the stained towel around her head. "I just colored my hair; it's not ritual sacrifice or anything. Although…" She trailed off speculatively. Charles sighed and rubbed his forehead.

"Is this the part where you threaten me with castration if I hurt your brother in any way?" Max asked. "I don't think I need to remind you that your brother can take care of himself."

"And I shouldn't need to remind you that I'm sitting right here," Charles said with some asperity. "Raven…"

"Oh, I know that." As she did whenever she decided Charles was inconvenient, Raven ignored him effortlessly. She braced her weight against the counter, rocking up on her toes and stretching, a cultivated nonchalance that didn't fool Charles in the least and probably didn't fool Max, either. "But," Raven said as she relaxed and took a sip of coffee, studying Max over the top of her mug, "he doesn't usually get serious about people like this, not so fast anyway."

" _Raven_ ," Charles snapped. She'd come far too close to the sort of history he never let himself think about. Raven, though, hung onto it with a doggedness that surprised him.

"There's a first time for everything." Max darted Charles a quick look, concern and curiosity, and Charles didn't know whether he wanted to die or kill Raven before the conversation could progress any further.

Raven snorted. "I didn't say this never happened before, only that he doesn't usually do it this way. Which means it'll either end with you two growing old and sappy together, or in complete utter apocalyptic ruin _." She paused. "By the way, do I have to watch where I sit in the study?"_

"That's quite enough," Charles said briskly, before the conversation could escalate – or deteriorate – any further. "Raven, Max needs to finish his breakfast so he can be back in town in time to do… shop-related things. And I have to prepare some materials for Hank when he comes over, so if you don't mind…"

"I don't mind at all," Raven said with a sweet smile.

"Who's Hank?" Max asked, and Charles could have kissed him for the change of subject.

They _did_ kiss later, after Raven had wandered off, something slow exchanged just inside the front door.

"I'll be down soon," Charles promised, after Max said (for the third time, Charles thought with some pride) that he really did need to get going if he wanted to get the shop in order before nine. "Do you have any need for nineteenth-century taxidermy? Vintage photos of cats in ridiculous outfits?"

"The store's customer base seems very cat-obsessed," Max said. He stepped back, despite holding on to Charles's hand. The smile he wore was rueful. "I don't really want to face the ravening hordes today."

"You could stay."

"Not an option; my partner would hunt me down." Max opened the door and stepped out into the light and the beginning of a warm summer day. Charles followed, squinting a bit.

After the awkwardness of one last kiss and Max thanking him for the instant oatmeal, Charles stood and watched Max and his car crunch their way down the gravel drive and around the hill and out of sight. The car, a nondescript Toyota, didn't fit Max at all, Charles thought absently as the quiet thrumming of the engine softened and vanished with distance. A vintage car, something sleek, an Aston-Martin maybe – not flashy, but effortless, not having to flaunt itself, something out of a Bond movie.

Raven slunk up just as he was contemplating heading back inside to start preparing for Hank's arrival. She was, he saw, conciliatory, her fingers fussing together as they did whenever she knew she owed an apology but hesitated over giving it.

And her hair –

"Well," Charles said, "that's certainly new."

"I decided to do something different." _Different_ is a shameless red. Raven tosses her hair over her shoulder. "Maybe I'll cut it."

"It certainly is a change." Ten years ago, back when Charles thought he might be able to control Raven, he might have said something. No point to it now. "You've a bit of dye right there."

Raven touched her forehead. "It'll come out." She hovered close, half-reaching to pull him into a hug. "You've fallen for this guy awfully fast."

"Thank you for that," Charles sighed. "Do we really have to have this conversation?"

"He seems nice enough, but you literally met him three days ago." Apparently, they did, or at least Raven thought so. "Charles, you don't need to know everyone's mysteries. You don't need to _fix_ everybody."

 _Like you tried to fix me_ remained unspoken. When they'd been little, Raven had gone from adoring her older brother to telling him he didn't need to be _such an older brother_ all the time, she could take care of herself – of the gulf between herself and their resentful mother, a father who loved them but in a distant, hesitant way as though unsure of how to express the emotion, and the distance had been even greater for her, adopted as she was. The protest had turned into a resentment that had only ended when Charles went to Boston for college and Raven had found some independence.

"Some things are immutable, my dear."

Raven bridled at the _my dear_ and muttered "Thanks for fucking condescending to me." Charles sighed and rubbed at the incipient headache in his right temple.

"I just… I mean I can't help it," he said at last. He thought about explaining to her how time didn't always matter, that he _knew_ Max already, despite knowing nothing about him at all. _That's so Pride and Prejudice_ , Raven might say, and Charles had to admit it made no sense. But, all the same, it was true.

"I'm allowed to have a few romantic indiscretions," he said instead. "They keep life interesting, and you always complain I'm too boring."

Raven took one of his hands in hers; in the sunlight, her hair waved copper and scarlet. "Charles, the last time you had a _romantic indiscretion_ , it ended with you almost dead and me getting a call from Germany at three in the morning and freaking out." She scowled. "If I never see She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named again, it'll be too soon."

"I've moved past that, and you really should too." Raven carried a grudge like she was gunning for the World Endurance Championships in Grudge-Carrying. "I was hardly blameless, and anyway, in case you hadn't noticed, I _did_ survive."

"I don't know how you believe half the crap that comes out of your mouth," Raven grumbled. She pulled him into a hug, arms clasped tight around his shoulders. "Just, don't do anything too incredibly stupid this time."

"I'll try not to," Charles assured her, and she laughed her quiet, frustrated laugh and kissed his cheek.

"Just to let you know," she told him, "we're having an emergency meeting of the writing group tonight. Darwin's having an existential crisis over a sestina."

* * *

Erik ghosted into the shop through the back door, and took the stairs up to his flat. It was probably a good thing, he reflected as he stumbled through his living room, that he hadn't showered at Charles's; eight o' clock pressed on him, and he'd have to hustle to shower, change, and go through the tedium of preparing the shop to open.

Levine wasn't in evidence, not in Erik's living room or kitchen or, fortunately for him, the bedroom or bathroom. Erik stepped into the tiny shower cubicle – shades, he thought, of the backpacking dorm he'd visited in Switzerland a lifetime ago – and cranked the heat up to the edge of blistering. Neither that nor the relentless pound of the water across his face and chest distracted him much.

Charles was, he knew, the most colossal bad idea in the history of bad ideas, like starting land wars with Russia. _You must always be a rebel about something_ , his mother would say, half-fond and half-exasperated with her unaccountable son, but somehow that rebellion had slipped its traces and even knowing it would endanger his pursuit, and the tenuous alliance with Moira that made it possible, it didn't care. _He_ couldn't care, already in too deep after a handful of days and last night.

He was not, Erik decided, thinking about last night. He shut the water off and marched out of the shower, dried himself mechanically, dressed in his shop uniform of jeans and t-shirt, because if you're doing something you dislike, you might as well be comfortable.

On his way downstairs, he stopped to pick up the photo of the waterfall. He had no idea where it had been taken, somewhere isolated with the water a clear torrent rushing down into a pool of the clearest, cleanest blue. Ferns hovered around the edge, and some tall trees with their roots grappling them to the bank, as thought about to leap in.

He set the photo back down on its table and went downstairs to open up.

Levine was downstairs, lurking in the shadows next to the cash desk. Erik smiled a thin, insincere good-morning to him and started to hunt for the cash register's instruction manual.

"I hope you have a good explanation for last night," Levine said. "A _very_ good explanation. Did you check your messages?"

"I don't believe I did," Erik said calmly. He pulled the register key from his pocket, turned it in the lock, and began to type in the code to open the register up. "In case you don't remember, I don't owe you any sort of obedience, Mr. Trent."

Trent was Levine's code name; it suited him, affected and too far up his own ass and protocol to do anything useful. Levine frowned at him. "And in case you don't remember, Mr. Eisenhardt, we can always pull our backing. You'll be left high and dry, and back at square one."

"Hardly." With an effort, Erik forced himself to concentrate on counting the money in the till, and reminded himself he would need to dust some of the displays. There was too much damn clutter. "I'm close now, a hell of a lot closer than I was, and if I decide to take care of this myself, I will."

"And we'll be right there to stop you," Levine said. _To arrest you_ , ran barely underneath the words. Erik shrugged, and Levine, bristling, added, "For Mr. Q, if nothing else."

"I'd _love_ to know what evidence you have." Erik slid out from behind the desk and headed for the front window and the displays. Levine lapsed into a prickly silence behind him, his anger crawling across Erik's shoulders ( _never turn your back on your enemy, or your friend, or anyone_ , Shaw whispered, paternal), and if he had a gun with him, Levine _could_ stop him, if he wanted.

He didn't, and wouldn't; Levine was more Moira's creature than he was the government's, and if Moira wanted him alive, she'd drag Erik back from the grave, if she had to.

"Is Schmidt really worth prison?" Levine asked. He rarely came out and asked those sorts of questions.

"He's worth anything," Erik said fiercely, and turned the lock on the front door to open it.

The day turned slowly. Levine left, off to haunt the town and do whatever white-bread things he did while pretending not to surveille Erik. On the few occasions the door opened, Erik listened for a familiar step – not Moira's, not Levine's, but one he'd become attuned to anyway – and the one voice he'd started looking forward to. That, he figured as he rang up a customer, was the rebellious side speaking, digging its claws into the idea of Charles against all common sense and Moira's explicit orders, and as he waited out the day, Erik found he didn't really care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some people have asked for the writing group, so they'll be making an appearance soon! Also, taxidermied animals.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB/Warning: All science in this chapter is made up. Fortunately, there isn't much of it.

**Chapter eight**

Ma-mère Xavier had never bred cats, Charles remembered. Instead, the cats had somehow found _her_ , through some mysterious feline radar that allowed them to detect the proximity of humans who not only loved cats but viewed them as superior to human beings. Not that Ma-mère Xavier had disliked other members of her own species – Charles's father had come into existence, after all – but in all the photographs Charles had seen of her she was more likely to be accompanied by a cat, and in her portrait in the family gallery, her husband (né Corcoran; he had changed his name, which caused quite a scandal at the time) was a distinctly minor presence, pressed into the background by his wife and the five family cats gathered around them. In that portrait, he sat at Ma-mère Xavier's left side, and his right hand rested awkwardly on the slippery silk of her dress, while her own left hand caressed a massive, hairy creature that gazed at the portraitist with green-eyed smugness.

After Ma-mère's death, the cat population had faded to a handful, most of them tenanting the barn and the park, where they wrought havoc among the mice and the chipmunks, instead of on Charles's allergies.

(Occasionally, Charles had idle thoughts about studying them – they were reasonably isolated, and the current descendants seemed to demonstrate some interesting tendencies when it came to adapting to their environment – except that… that would probably be going too far, and Ma-mère's spirit probably wouldn't approve of her grandson using Tibbles' many-many-times-great-grandchildren for a study in isolated population genetics.)

Given Ma-mère's passion, it was unsurprising that, when he had gone up to rearrange some of the attic to make room for his father's and mother's effects, he found not one, not two, but three large boxes of photo albums, entirely dedicated to the Xavier cats. Several featured photos printed on heavy cardboard, faded and printed in flowery script to resemble Victorian postcards – photos, Charles recalled with some amusement, that featured some of the tamer Xavier cats in an array of outfits. An opera singer complete with bodice and full, flounced skirts, a gentleman in black tie and tails, Charlie Chaplin, a dairymaid with her calico skirt and a pair of tiny pails next to her paw.

Max would probably be interested in some of them, Charles told himself. He hadn't been joking earlier that day. He'd go up into the attic at the next opportunity and pick some out – tonight, he decided, after Hank –

Oh. Hank.

"… and the problem with Kovalev's thesis is – Dr. Xavier?" Hank, Charles thought, that was Hank, sounding concerned.

"What? The problem with Kovalev's thesis is…?" Charles sat up and tried to look invested. "Kovalev's helped revolutionize phylogeography. If you've a criticism of his arguments, you ought to be sure you're reading it properly."

"I was going to say that he doesn't take -- it _sounds_ like he doesn't take – Gillespie's work on balancing selection at the molecular level into sufficient account," Hank had paused mid-tap, his index finger hesitating above his tablet. "I, um, I don't mean to pry, Dr. Xavier, but are you okay? Because, um, you've like – you've been in another universe all day."

"Perfectly fine," Charles said, and to prove it offered Hank his most winning smile.

"You always smile like that before you give the undergrads their next lab assignment," Hank told him. "They learn to get scared of it by the end of the first month."

"It's not my fault they've no sense of intellectual adventure." Charles made himself focus on his own tablet, and the half-read file he'd pulled up and more or less completely forgotten about. Instead of studying it, he imagined telling Hank he'd been more interested in replaying the events from last night, and conjuring up the flimsiest excuse to cut out of their meeting and go into town, and then imagined Hank overcome with the unsettling notion that overcame students (even graduate students) when realizing their professors had a life – a _romantic life_ (Charles thought this with some pride) – outside the lab and the classroom. It was a strange, imaginary conversation that mostly consisted of Charles rambling about Max and Hank absorbing it in a stunned, terminally awkward silence.

As it stood, the silence now was awkward, but not terminally so. Charles idly dragged a finger back and forth across the tablet's touchscreen. "Your criticism of Kovalev is valid," he said, after he'd managed to drag his mind back to the problem of palaeogenetics and stochiastics, "and we do need to address that, but _carefully_. In fact," and oh, _here_ was an idea; Charles congratulated himself, "why don't you take over that part of the introduction? Consider it professional development."

"You…" Hank stared at him, wide eyes magnified by his glasses, "you want _me_ to co-write the introduction of your book. With you. Co-author."

"I would hardly say so if the offer weren't genuine." He also probably wouldn't say so if it wouldn't redirect Hank's attention. "You'll need to learn how to address differences of opinion with senior scholars; I'll back you, of course, because I do believe your criticism has merit. But your task is to…"

He rambled on about professionalism and tactfulness to an unheeding Hank, who had by now turned bright red and was grinning helplessly down at his tablet and fidgeting in his seat. "Why don't we call this a day?" Charles suggested. He glanced out the window; the study faced south, but the light had already faded to afternoon, edging its way to evening and stretching the shadows out under the trees. "I'm sure you want to get going."

"I need to tell Raven," Hank answered, too overcome to adopt his usual position of pained uncertainty when it came to his crush on Charles's little sister.

"Go along then; I'll email you some more instructions," Charles said, and Hank was halfway to the door before the words had quite left Charles's mouth.

The study echoed with the strange, buzzing half-silence of a room newly emptied, Hank's excited footsteps fading as they took him to – well, where, Charles had no idea. Raven was holed up with the writing group, and Hank seemed to have no idea what to make of them, even if he sometimes ended up grafting himself to Raven's side and drinking a beer while he tried to follow Angel's disquisitions on colonialism and multiple, intersecting identities and appropriating the nineteenth-century genre of the fictional autobiography for new audiences. What Raven thought of her maybe-boyfriend attending these sessions, Charles had no idea and no intention of asking.

Which, Charles told himself, was why he would go up to the attic and start hunting for likely items to take down to Max. Raven would be distracted with her friends, and certainly wouldn't welcome his intrusion. Still, the stairway that led up to the attic was, for some unaccountable reason, near one of the drawing rooms, the one which Raven had appropriated for the writing group, and that meant risking some of Raven's displeasure.

Or, he _would_ have run that risk if Raven and her associates were in the room. Glancing in, he saw the coffee table and its companion tables under a chaos of papers, bottles, and chip bags, shoes kicked off haphazardly. A whoop of laughter bounced off the walls and the marble floors. The kitchen, then, Charles supposed.

"Hey, Professor X," a familiar, but unexpected voice, said from the depths of the couch.

"Oh, hello, Darwin." Drawing closer revealed the aforementioned Darwin stretched out, half-devoured by the couch's cushions. A small pile of paper occupied a corner of the coffee table; Darwin had his own sheaf, marked over in vivid, angry red.

"Raven and the others've gone to get food and something to drink. Well, more something to drink." Darwin nodded at his own glass. Water, Charles supposed. Darwin smiled ruefully. "I might need my own after this, but whoever's getting feedback can't drink until after. Rules, after Sean got drunk during a crit session and started crying. I might do that, come to think of it."

"I'm sure it's not quite as bad as you think," Charles said. "Raven said you were having an existential crisis."

"Yeah." Darwin's eyes screwed shut in frustration. "My advisor said I should look at possibilities for subverting traditional poetic form and content, but this feels so _forced_. I recognize the importance of structure in the creation of meaning, but I've always preferred more organic approaches to composition. Adaptation. Change. Free verse isn't _quite_ free, you understand, but I prefer that kind of challenge."

"Of course," Charles agreed. The next time Raven accused him of rambling on incomprehensibly about incomprehensible things only he could comprehend, he was going to mention this conversation.

Darwin had pushed himself up to something resembling a normal sitting position, but which nonetheless left his arms and legs sprawled across the greater length of the couch and across the back. He'd also fixed Charles with a look, the sort of look that belonged to a rather younger person working out how to broach a sensitive topic to an older one, and Darwin was enough the serious grown-up of Raven's herd of authors that Charles immediately went on the alert.

"Something tells me you want to know something, and it's not about if I can help with the sestina," Charles said.

"Raven's worried about you."

"Oh?" Charles sighed. _Lovely_. "I can imagine what this is about, although I really don't want to."

"She's just looking out for you," Darwin said, sounding halfway between conciliatory and guilty; clearly discussion of Charles's _indiscretion_ had become privileged information. "I mean, he does sound kind of scary, even if you strip away the hyperbole."

"Oh, for god's sake." A headache had begun to develop behind his right eye, frustration tying a neat little knot of pain just under his skull. He'd have to talk to Raven and explain some salient, necessary facts to her, and endure her _Well, now you know how I felt when I was sixteen and you were all up in my business every time I turned around_ lecture, and the genuine concern that he honestly couldn't be angry with, because it came from a place and a time Raven couldn't seem to leave behind.

"She wants us to meet him," Darwin added, and, over Charles's _over my dead body_ , continued, "She's half-convinced he's on the run, possibly from the law, possibly from the Mob, most likely both. Angel voted for a tragic past that's left him completely alone in the world. Alex thinks he's an ex-con, but he wants to meet him before he decides what he's guilty of."

"What do _you_ think?" Charles asked, and prayed for Darwin to say something like _Not my business_ or _He sounds lovely, and I'm sure you'll be very happy together_.

Footsteps sounded from down the hall, and laughter – Raven's high-pitched, Angel's throaty, Hank asking if Raven _really_ didn't mind him staying – but Charles hesitated on the edge of leaving, waiting for Darwin's answer.

"Raven writes fiction," Darwin said at last. He slouched back down into the embrace of the couch and picked up his poems, for all the world as if he hadn't moved a muscle since Raven and the others had left.

"She writes fiction, but some things you just can't make up."

* * *

Erik rarely had the opportunity to sit and consider what his life had become. Being on the run from ruthless, powerful, and well-connected murderers tended to prevent that sort of reflection, and reflecting on the life of an in-home computer repairman in Midwest City, Oklahoma wasn't something he had wanted to do frequently at all. And, at any rate, thinking those thoughts tended to lead back to the _before_ , when he'd been young (or younger) and had parents, a family, the unutterable privilege of waking up to safety every morning, no prospect of any threat on the horizon.

Now, _now_ , though, his life had been threatening to become something again, or something other than the colossal, fucked-up thing it had been for so long now.

Charles had parked himself on a rickety stool, the mate of the equally rickety one behind the cash desk, and looked as if the store had assembled itself around him, that reliable and permanent. A half-eaten sandwich from his favorite café – the one he'd taken Erik to, the one it seemed like Erik had been going to forever even though it had been barely a week – sat by his elbow. Occasionally Charles would pick it up, absently take a bite, and set it back down without looking up from his book.

And every now and then he _would_ look up, if Erik stole his bottle of water or moved in a particular way, he'd smile, an expression peculiar to Charles if only in its utter sincerity. After years of Frost, and worse, Shaw, Erik could find the ulterior motive that hid in the stray fold of a lip or the narrowing of an eye. Look as he did, he couldn't find _anything_ in Charles, except unreserved delight and warmth.

It was Wednesday. Slow, aside from a clutch of tourists and a few women Erik sensed had come to check him out more than to check out the merchandise. Charles, when he'd realized this, had grumbled quietly about displaying goods one doesn't mean to sell and _t-shirts_ , and scowled at them from his book.

"If you keep on this way, I'll have to start paying you," Erik told him. _This way_ had been Charles turning up in the morning, not long after opening, armed with a box of black-and-white cat photos and a reminder of his promise to help Erik move and sort the books in the back room.

"I'm sure I could come up with an acceptable payment method," Charles said. His smile melted into laziness, pleasure curled at the corner of his mouth. "Barter, maybe. Exchange of services."

"No objections here," and Erik leaned across the cash desk to kiss Charles and chase the clean taste of the water through his mouth.

"Although," Charles said when Erik let him up, looking rather more disheveled now, "it was worth it, just to get those books out of that awful, musty room."

"Hm," Erik agreed, and ran a thumb across Charles's soft, sleek lips, and kissed him again.

Erik now had two nineteenth-century bookcases filled with books, organized by Charles into an order that elevated the collection into something almost respectable. And if it meant that he got to watch Charles in his rolled-up shirt sleeves moving boxes and bending to sort stacks of books into categories, and assign the kind of salacious intent that didn't really belong to doing things like writing the sticker for the Essays section (which Charles had done, kneeling with something very much like grace, lower lip caught up under his teeth as he wrote). Erik wasn't going to complain.

He could, Erik thought, get used to this. _Too_ used to this. Warning bells should have been going off by now, but all he could manage (as if, he thought, Charles had sneaked in and cut the wires, no power for the security system, and he was in and he could do with Erik whatever he wanted) was a vague fear that he wasn't particularly afraid or angry at all.

"Max?" Charles's voice, soft but cutting through Erik's distraction. He spared a moment to hate his fucking borrowed name just a little bit more. "Max, we've got customers."

"These are the most _adorable_ things," a young, feminine voice said. "Oh, Scott, _look at these_."

The young man, ostensibly the boyfriend, shuffled over to have a look at the Xavier Collection. (This was the private term for the assortment of cat photographs Charles had brought down that morning.) A bit of his reserve melted under his girlfriend's enthusiasm and the onslaught of "Isn't the most adorable – no, isn't _this_ the most adorable thing you've seen in your life? Look at the _paws_ , Scott!"

Charles was grinning crazily into his book. Erik poked him.

"You're related to the person who had those pictures taken, you know."

"Oh, I know," Charles agreed. "My sister reminds me of this on a near-daily basis. At least it's not an antique bleeding kit or enema apparatus."

The beleaguered Scott ended up buying ten of the photographs for his girlfriend, who cooed over both him and them as they left the shop hand-in-hand. It was, Erik thought as he watched them go, faintly nauseating.

As he turned to Charles again, a red flashing caught the corner of his vision. _The bomb, the bomb_ , raced hysterically through his brain and froze his blood with adrenaline, before reason reasserted itself, and Charles's quietly concerned _Max?_ , and the bomb became a phone again, his phone blinking furiously at him from its corner behind the register.

Levine's message had gone unheard – Erik couldn't even bother to delete it – and he was sure at least three of Moira's had joined it by now. Levine had to have told her; as much as he disliked Erik, and as much as he disapproved of Moira's decision to handle things the way she had, he'd had enough active fear of her to keep him in line and keep him updating her on Erik's chronic misbehavior. And, Erik figured, she'd be home soon enough, and there'd be time to deal with it then, the life that wouldn't let him be and that he couldn't, for reasons he considered good and sufficient, leave behind.

"Are you okay?" Charles again, leaning in close, hand shaped comfortingly to the curve of Erik's bicep. "Max, what's going on?"

"Nothing," he said hoarsely. The room slowly reformed itself around him, the cabinets and bookcases, Charles half off his stool and gazing at him with liquid blue eyes that, Erik thought, should terrify him with how familiar they'd become. "Just dizzy all of a sudden."

"Okay," Charles said, thoroughly unconvinced. He didn't let go, and Erik didn't protest. "You should – " he paused, editing what he was about to say, " – would you like to come over tonight?"

He wanted to, very, very much. _Too_ much, if he were being honest with himself. Erik had made a policy of being honest, with other people – with Janos Quested, who'd earned Erik's honest hatred and the full expression of it, with Moira, with Levine – and he'd found letting himself entertain his own illusions could never end well. What the two of them had, it could only end badly, and Erik could see the disaster coming clear as day, a film played on to its inevitable end.

"Come upstairs with me," he said, instead of the ten thousand honest things he should have said. "Let me close up, and then come upstairs?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, there may actually be plot happening soon. At last. And there should be an update to Changeling soon as well. I've had to rewrite the next chapter about ten million times, because it just. does. not. want to work. Also, somehow this turned into a chapter with 500 words about Ma-mère Xavier and her cats, of whom I've grown kind of fond. So, sorry about that.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, first, I have no idea why or how, but a lovely Anon liked the pulp novel Charles picks up back in Chapter One and asked for the _The X-Men_ 's cover text. Well, ascoolsuchasi obliged with some cover art (and excerpt) and sharpestscalpel with a frank and sometimes shocking blurb! You can see them all up [here](http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/5215.html?thread=6511711) at the kinkmeme. So, thank you lovely Anon, ascoolsuchasi, and sharpestscalpel!

**Chapter nine**

Max had taken him to bed that afternoon, pushing Charles through the claustrophobic space of his apartment and into a whitewashed bedroom empty except for the bed and a table, the two of them and their desperation. In short order, Charles had found himself pushed down on rumpled sheets and his shirt pushed up and off, Max pulling at his trousers and pressing rough kisses across Charles's collar bones and his chest and his stomach, and Charles would have been embarrassed at his own hunger, if Max hadn't been so preoccupied with taking him apart.

"… _the Repairman's blood splattered hot across the side of her face, a bone fragment sliced across her cheek, but Lesley didn't feel it, or the weight of the carcass as she_ – Charles? _Charles!_ "

"What?" Charles dragged himself up from his distraction, surfacing enough to catch at the bloody tail-end of Raven's words. Max had kissed him, insistent even though Charles had opened for him right away. "That's… um." Charles shook his head. "That's very eloquent, Raven. Very lurid."

"And you've been staring at the same piece of paper for the past twenty minutes." Raven paused. " _And_ you've been mooning around since Thursday. _Five days_ , Charles."

"I have not been mooning," Charles said. He fought the urge to take his frustrations out on the helpless piece of paper in his hand. Next to his right elbow, the phone sat silent, as it had for the past three days and nights. "Contrary to popular belief, I _am_ an adult male, not a teenager."

"I knew he'd get cold feet," Raven muttered discontentedly from her chair. _Her_ chair, from back when they'd been children playing in the study and Charles had been Sherlock Holmes and Raven had been a strange combination of Watson and Doyle. (She had, Charles remembered, frequently been the author of increasingly complicated and bloody mysteries for them to solve.) The Raven of the here-and-now dragged her toes across the carpet, a sign she had much more to say on the subject but was holding back.

Instead of answering, Charles pointedly refocused on the Xavier Trust's quarterly statements and let the silence stew as long as Raven could stand it.

"Really, it was only a matter of time," Raven tried again, infusing her tone with a generous measure of contempt. "You're better off without him."

"He had to go down to the city to take care of some things," Charles said. He didn't trust himself to look up at her; the soft scuffing of her toes against the carpet grated, and if he did look at her he'd probably say something they'd both regret. "People do, in fact, go to New York City for business on occasion. Sometimes it even takes them more than a day. It's quite shocking, isn't it?"

"Probably meeting up with his connections." Raven's chair squeaked as she shifted to tuck one foot beneath her. "I bet he's whacking someone even as we speak."

"Raven, he's either a crazed Mob assassin out for revenge or a jerk with commitment problems who's stringing me along. He can't be both." Max had stretched out next to him, spine arching eloquently, head tipped back to stare at the crazings and cracks in his ceiling. When he'd looked back at Charles, Charles's heart had skipped treacherously at what he'd seen in Max's face.

"There's no reason he can't be; I bet Mob assassins are all jerks with commitment problems. And they clearly don't have any problem lying, it's why they're assassins." Raven poked moodily at her laptop, a quick series of clicks changing to a _bang-bang-bang_ as she hit the delete key. "I suppose I should be happy, he's making _Wanted_ a lot easier to work on."

"That explains the bloodthirstiness, then," Charles said, mostly to himself. A snort told him he'd been overheard. "I don't suppose if I swore I'd take full responsibility for my inevitably broken heart, you'd leave it alone."

"Not a chance. The last time you took full responsibility for your broken heart, you almost got killed." Raven chewed on her lower lip and said something bitter and inaudible and stared fixedly at her laptop. Under the fall of her red hair, her mouth worked with silent perorations, likely against Max and most definitely against Charles.

"Actually, my almost dying was more the fault of compromised structural integrity, not Moira turning me down," Charles pointed out, which earned him a "ha!" and the reminder that Raven didn't portion out responsibility and causality that way.

She'd seen her brother alone, hopes cruelly dashed, leave the country and do something foolish while under the influence of disappointment, and her absence had meant she'd been unable to stop him, or talk sense into him, or make the party responsible pay for her crimes. _That_ was how Raven worked, the trail of her thought full of convolutions and logical traps, and Charles had always felt he'd stumbled along it in blind darkness. That she was _afraid_ for him, and showing it in her usual rough, careless way didn't help as much as it usually did. He could usually handle Raven's difficult edges and avoid being cut on them – an art Charles wished he'd learned much earlier – but today… today. His patience had stretched past some breaking point he hadn't known it had, and he had his own difficult edges, too. Charles sighed.

"I know," Raven said, returning to the attack, hitching herself forward in her chair, "but you didn't have anyone with you to make sure you were never in a position to go into that building in the first place." _I wasn't there_ was what she meant, and most times he could deal with it, Raven's misplaced sense of responsibility never making itself so painfully, awkwardly known, but now he couldn't.

"I would very much prefer not to have this conversation." The day sat strangely on him, discontentment with the calm of the summer and the routine, and there probably was some truth to what Raven had said about him and Max. "I know you're worried, Raven, I do, and I _do_ understand why, but you were the one encouraging me to put myself out there, if you remember. I can't be a monk and have a relationship at the same time."

"It's just, it's like telling someone who's boring and never leaves the house to have some fun for once, and they decide to go sky-diving. Without a parachute. And you'd just thought they'd go to the mall or whatever."

"Yes, well," Charles said lightly, "I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree. On _all_ of this."

"I'm worried about you, and you go all patronizing on me?" Raven snapped. She glared at him, all trace of ennui and false disinterestedness gone. "What the actual _fuck_ , Charles?"

"That's _enough_." Anger slipped its leash and he couldn't bring himself to care. "Raven, I know why you're doing this, and I appreciate the concern. I _do_. But I'm not that person, that boy, anymore, and my life _isn't_ something for your novel. Or, touching as it is, your writing group."

"Fine." Raven shot to her feet, yanking impatiently at the power cord to her laptop. Charles watched – and he _had_ taken out the day on the quarterly reports; they'd gone crumpled and sweat-damp in his hands – as she slammed the laptop cover shut and stalked off, trailing irritation behind her like a banner.

Once Charles was sure she was safely away, he flipped his laptop open and pulled up the search screen he'd had to hide for the better part of the afternoon.

He flipped idly through the list of results for search term: _Max Eisenhardt_ , mostly genealogical information for men long gone to their graves in Europe, although one turned up in a kindergarten class photograph and another was a sixty-year-old, balding partner in a law firm in Berlin. Briefly, Charles entertained the thought of printing out a few pages of the results and showing them to Raven as proof that Charles was involved with someone absolutely unremarkable, but then he imagined Raven (actuated by her argument that lack of evidence was itself evidence of some more profound conspiracy) persuading Hank to hack into all manner of law enforcement databases.

That, and Charles did find himself surprised that someone as remarkable as Max should make no visible mark on the world. He told himself it was the first blush of love ( _obsession_ , Raven corrected in the back of his head) speaking, and only that, but couldn't quite make himself believe it. _You and your feelings_ , Raven might say here, rolling her eyes at the strange convictions he had about people (convictions, he told himself, that were more right than not most of the time), and beyond the obvious physical attraction, he knew bone-deep there was an extraordinariness about Max.

Experimentally, he ran a search for "Eisenhardt house fire." The results came back for an Eisenhower house fire and an Eisenstadt house fire, other unrelated house fires in the Midwest, a site on how to prevent house fires, and a few archived news stories from eight years ago about an explosion and fire at a Lehnsherr residence in Dusseldorf.

Raven would accuse him of morbidity, but what the hell, Charles pulled up the page. He scrolled through the story, picking out scraps of information from the German. At the time of the story's composition, the investigation was ongoing, notable perhaps because the explosion had been tentatively assigned to an up-and-coming Neo-Nazi group, and the murder of a quiet family of Jewish doctors seemed like the sort of thing Neo-Nazis would enjoy doing. A leader in Dusseldorf's Jewish community said something Charles couldn't parse, but likely having to do with their collective grief, how much the family – Jakob and Edie, their son Erik – had been loved, what a tragedy it was.

There were pictures, one of the house engulfed in flames and of its ruined and smoking carcass, one of the husband and wife smiling at the camera in a candid shot, spilling over with their happiness and their utter ignorance of the terrible fate they would meet.

And there was one of Max.

* * *

The train ride into Grand Central hadn't done much to clear his head, but by the time he arrived and found a room, and gotten into the deliberate pace of hunting, Erik felt purpose return to him again. Charles tugged on him, a spell slow to break (harder at night, when Erik lay in another bed, the narrow margin of space at his side curiously empty), but reminders of the price of failure and how long he had waited resharpened his focus. In the space between the life Moira had forged for him and the life he'd made for himself ( _the life Shaw made for you_ , he thought), he was awkward, hung up, half a young man with a future spreading bright before him and half Shaw's own ruthless creation.

Two days down in the city and he hadn't found anything. Moira would have people staking out Atom, the club-hotel-restaurant that was the jewel of Schmidt Holdings Limited, and they – or some of them – would know him. Moira was probably down there herself, not that she would ever say, Erik thought darkly.

 _If I so much as hear the tiniest, vaguest whisper that you've been down at Atom – if you even think of setting foot on Fifth Avenue – I will end you._

That had been on Moira's list of conditions for Erik's participation in bringing Shaw to justice. She'd construed _participation_ a bit too narrowly for his tastes, Erik thought, hell-bent on keeping him safe and locked up tight for a trial Erik would prefer to never happen. His knowledge of Shaw's operations – a general sense of the overall command structure, some of the finances, the development of very illegal technology (to which Erik had been an unwilling party), the people above all – had some value, but where Moira saw the trial of the century, Erik saw Shaw's death.

So, Erik supposed, it was just as well he was nowhere near Atom or Fifth Avenue, but the Lower East Side, a brownstone whose fourth-floor windows looked east to the Williamsburg Bridge and west to the gold light of Chinatown. One night Erik had stood on the roof of the Hellfire Club and watched the city march northward to its summit of skyscrapers, and Shaw had mused delightedly on how the cars and buses crawled through the city like ants, and the hive of _opportunity, opportunity, Erik, for so much, so many things_.

By day, Hellfire masqueraded as an upscale diner, the sort frequented by people with a misguided sense of irony and appreciation for overpriced, fancy sandwiches. The sandwich artists (artisans, Shaw would say tranquilly) and waitresses were legitimate employees of Alighieri, but back beyond the door, and what the diner became at night behind the walls… "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," Shaw was fond of saying. _The way down to Avernus is easy, but to rise again and to return to the upper air – that is the labor, that is the difficulty._

"Ignore him, sugar," Emma Frost had said, rising smoothly to greet him that first time he'd met her, on an interview trip to New York back when Shaw had been someone simply interested in his talent, and he had been young and stupid. Her hand had been as cool as her name, as the diamonds clustered at her throat. "He has pretensions."

Why Shaw, who liked pretensions, kept Erik around (Erik, who didn't), was question Erik almost wanted answered enough to let Shaw die slowly. He _had_ been kept close from those first days, not shunted off into the labyrinth of underlings and small-time runners, or even the techies who hacked government systems and debugged the organization's communications. No, it had been the world for him, the villa in Argentina and Shaw's new mansion in Santorini and a dozen other safehouses and apartments. The penthouse near the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin had been the second place struck off Erik's list.

Shaw had escaped from the conflagration in Argentina, along with Frost and Quested. The last Erik had heard of Az, the man had died screaming in that same fire, and that hadn't been anywhere near enough to slake his rage. And maybe Shaw knew it, and had a sense of what he had created: since that night, all the places Erik knew had gone quiet, left vacant or sold to owners wholly unaware of the ghosts that haunted the rooms around them.

A few customers drifted in and out of Alighieri, none of them familiar. Erik resettled himself behind the screen of the coffee shop curtain. In front of him, his forgotten cup of coffee cooled; only habit kept him turning the pages of his book.

The news that had brought him and Moira here – well, to North Salem, at any rate – had been fresh, but had weeks now to grow cold. A tip had come through from an informant either stupid or greedy enough to go behind Shaw's back that he had returned to New York, and then confirmation that Klaus Schmidt would be in town to lobby personally for political interests ahead of next year's elections.

"It's where he feels safest," Erik had told Moira not long after the beginning of their agreement. "His most powerful."

"We'll keep an eye on his usual places, then," Moira had said.

The usual places had stayed cold for three years.

Hellfire stayed cold still, Erik thought after his third hour of watching. His own digging and Moira's hadn't unearthed any sign the property had been transferred; DeSnowe Properties LLC still held the title – or, Erik knew, Frost Corp. did, on the other end of a maze of paper and shadow companies and filters that turned dirty money pure as driven snow. Erik breathed deep against the fury and turned another page.

 _What are you doing here?_ he asked himself. A mouthful of cold coffee provided no answers. Shaw's unique sense of pride and recklessness, living above the very rooms where he engaged in the transactions of fungible human lives – the lives of Erik's parents among them – had always stuck in Erik's craw. That Shaw had himself hedged about with power and money and was, for all that he'd done and taken, untouchable and reveling in it as he played chess with Erik and watched the city turn on beyond the windows… Erik had to set his coffee cup down before he threw it.

If Shaw had come down here, Erik thought, he had been long gone by now. Politics would keep him on the move, looking for the spotlight. Frost, cold and cautious, had always hated it, preferring the shadows, or at least a careful and guarded exposure instead of Shaw's flaunting his invulnerability. Erik imagined she thought of it as gauche.

He'd have to start paying closer attention to newsfeeds, he figured, if Shaw were on the move. Moira had been chasing the blind alleys of Shaw-and-Schmidt's finances, obstructed by the Byzantine operation that was the United States justice system, and that – that was why Erik had to do this himself, and sooner, rather than later.

 _Charles_. That had been a recurring nightmare since he'd left North Salem on Thursday, memories of Charles's body against his achingly acute and his face when Erik had explained about needing to go down to the city on business, with his partner returning. Charles had accepted it with a shrug and, rolling Erik over, had told him to hurry back, and Erik had breathed something that might have been agreement or a fervent wish to the humid curve of Charles's neck, and tried to let Charles's hands on his body make him forget how, on the other side of everything he had to do, he would probably never see Charles again.

He wanted it otherwise, _god_ how he wanted it. Magda had never quite been able to civilize him (her term for it, a longitudinal study on domesticating the feral engineering student), and they'd parted as the friends they'd always been, and lucky for her. He'd tried to keep tabs on her through the years, and that had been one of the things he'd asked from Moira at the beginning of their arrangement, to tell him if anything happened. Nothing had, and the relief whenever he thought about it would nearly stop his breath.

If anything happened to Charles, then – Erik carefully turned away from that road. His heart knocked hard once, twice, against the wall of his chest. He turned a page of his book and glanced out the window to the quiet exterior of Alighieri, where a boy had tied his dog's leash to a street sign and stepped inside, shouldering past a red-headed woman and a stroller. A few minutes later, the boy emerged with a paper bag, collected his dog, and walked away.

Briefly, Erik considered walking into the shop and through the small eating area to the door in the back. He could pick the lock, walk down the stairs to the basement room that was Hellfire, with its chrome and black marble and the bar where Quested and Az would sit while Shaw talked to a new, unwilling donor. In his fantasy, Shaw was there even now, and Erik could see him so clearly, so very clearly – tailored jacket and pants, tie loose, the perfect square of handkerchief in his breast pocket – his body thrummed with wanting violence.

In his jacket pocket, his cell phone rang, buzzing against his chest. He came back to himself, the kitschy coffee shop and its murmuring patrons, with a start and a gasp.

No need to look at the number, he thought as he pressed the accept button, and sure enough, Moira waited for him on the other end of the line.

"We," Moira said, the danger in her voice unobscured by the bad connection, "need to talk."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clearly working on the plot for "The Changeling" has infected my brain, because everything's suddenly getting all Gothic romance up in here. AT LEAST THE PLOT IS GOING NOW.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter ten**

There was a saying about sleeping dogs and letting them lie, but Charles had never put much stock in it. Anyway, over the past few days – working on the sixth now, almost a week since Max had left – he figured that the sleeping dog had well and truly woken up.

"Seeing as you like prodding things until they do, yeah, it's woken up," Raven had said over breakfast, when Charles had asked about the wisdom of continuing to investigate things even when one was sure said investigation would lead nowhere good. "Honestly, Charles, it's like your superpower." She'd looked at him narrowly over the screen of her laptop. "Do I have to hurt someone? Specifically, Max?"

"No, you don't," Charles had sighed. "I'm going out."

"I _am_ going to have to hurt him," Raven had muttered, and she'd kept a hawkeye on him, as though Charles were going to vanish in a cloud of impulse and heartbreak.

And so it was that, On the other side of yet another bad night's sleep and Raven hounding him about his distraction – _It's Max, isn't it, I knew you were getting too close, how did I let this happen again_ had been the part where he had had to leave before saying something uncivil – Charles found himself in the café he'd been in not even two weeks ago. He ignored the cup of tea cooling in front of him and the books he'd brought along so the waitress wouldn't hustle him off, caught in the restless, distracted space between his own thoughts and watching the door to the antiques shop. For the past few hours, he'd had himself for company, and a few vagrant thoughts that drifted in between trying to unknot the secret of Max Eisenhardt and hunting through the tourist crowds for a familiar face.

 _Angel was half right_.

The thought, abrupt as it was, startled a laugh out of him. She'd been the one to hypothesize a tragic past, if he recalled his conversation with Darwin properly.

How that squared with Max lying about the rest of it, Wisconsin and maybe being an engineer, Charles hadn't quite worked out yet. His failure had not been for lack of trying over the course of several days and nights.

It was probably – no, no probably about it, it just _was_ – a sign of some psychosis, or obsession, or something, that he'd parked himself in easy line of sight from a door that, sooner or later, Max had to use. _Impulsive_ would be more charitable, and Charles had to admit that, for all her exasperating hovering, Raven had had that right: when something or someone caught his eye, like hooking themselves around the most important part of him and pulling him, he was all-in, submerged and drowning and that was it. Most normal people, he figured, would be upset that the person they'd been sleeping with had lied to them about a significant percentage of his past, but in Charles the urge to pick over the scenario and look for explanations took the edge off, at least when he didn't too closely examine _why_ Max's lying ought to hurt.

Absently, he sipped his tea and winced at the bitterness of it, over-steeped as it was and with the milk warming forgotten on the table. Across the street, a few people wandered in and out of the shop, most emerging soon after entering. Maybe, Charles thought, the mysterious partner was in there. Maybe the mysterious partner was tied up in all of this.

Investigating the situation would at least be far more rewarding than sitting and stewing in it. Charles dropped a few dollars on the tabletop, collected his books, and left.

The antiques shop appeared as it always had since he and Max had rearranged it (a lifetime ago, it felt like, on the other side of revelation), with the Xavier Collection picked through and converted to a box filled with random trinkets. He ought to look over the old taxidermy collection and see what could be gotten rid of, Charles thought, and then wondered why he'd think that in the first place, if Max was going to be anything other than a shop owner. If, he thought, and the thought was like ice, whatever they had could get past this.

Max wasn't behind the counter. Relief and disappointment sat strangely in him, mixed with vague recognition of the man who _was_ behind the counter, unremarkable in a buttoned-up polo tucked into his jeans, and remarkable for not being a woman, and for having existed as a vague presence in the periphery of Charles's vision whenever he'd been down at the shop.

"Just a friend helping out for a bit," the man grunted when Charles asked. "I came up here to get them settled." He didn't sound terribly happy about either that or Charles being there and asking questions.

"Very kind of you," Charles muttered. "When do you expect Max back? I, ah, have some things I thought he'd be interested in. For the shop," he added, when the man's dark eyes sharpened with suspicion.

"Don't know." The man pointedly turned away to inspect some business cards tacked on the shop's bulletin board. "Will that be all?"

"Yes, thank you," Charles said with a politeness he did not feel. He glanced at the door in the back of the shop, the one that led upstairs to Max's flat, the one he'd taken barely a week ago and Max had pushed him up against it and kissed him like dying. No Max appeared through it now. "Have a nice day."

As he stepped out of the shop, he caught the edge of the man's suspicion, dark, narrowed eyes watching him through the barrier of the window, and barely visible in the shop's dim light, a phone cradled in his hand.

* * *

 _Talking_ , for Moira, had involved meeting over a chess board along the East River. Almost two hours afterward, with the train clacking its way northward, Erik tried to think of the last time he'd sat over a chess board, finding himself backed into an entirely different corner by Charles's maddening sincerity and his own isolation. It seemed impossibly long ago, a memory belonging to someone else. Instead of making him maudlin, it made him furious.

The train rattled along underneath him, prodding at the Moira-generated headache grinding behind his temples. He reached for deeper breathing, and for calmness. Both were reluctant. Despite his best efforts to put the past few hours – the past week, for that matter – behind him, his thoughts circled obsessively over them, picking at the details of the day: the slow, stagnant heat of the city, a breeze blowing in half-hearted from off the river, Moira in her carefully anonymous clothes tucking back some hair that breeze had blown astray.

"I seem to remember telling you something about _staying away_." Moira had offered him her sweetest, most perilous smile and toyed with a pawn, fingers clasped around the narrowing barrel of its body. She didn't play, although Erik suspected she would be ruthless if she did. To most eyes they would be a young couple playing hooky from work, more interested in each other than the game, bending close despite the warm day, the girl smiling teasingly and her boyfriend sitting still in a self-contained happiness. That the most he'd been able to manage for Moira was a grudging admiration for her efficiency, and her willingness to use force (or terror) if necessary, made the difference between his perception of the situation and the occasional glances of the passers-by, even more jarring.

Now, on the ride back up to Salem Center, Erik was not entirely immune to the memory of Charles stepping around the coffee table to straddle Erik and press himself close, nor had he been when Moira had leaned close, her breath warm against the breeze under the oaks, and said, "In fact, I'm _very_ sure I told you to keep your ass in Salem Center where it belongs."

"While you fuck around with warrants and Shaw laughs behind your back?" Moira's face had gone dangerously dark. "I find your faith in the American justice system _very_ touching, as is your belief that it will succeed where the Germans and Interpol have failed, but you'll forgive me if I want to accomplish slightly more than nothing."

"As a matter of fact," Moira had said, "I _have_ accomplished something… but you'll forgive me if I don't share what it is just now."

She'd lectured him instead, and that, _oh_ , how that grated. Her words wove through the rhythmic racketing of the train down its tracks, a series of _jeopardizing the case_ and _I would much, much rather see you behind the witness stand instead of in a coffin. Or, you know, a jail cell_ (and he knew for a fact she'd put him there, if she thought it would do any good) and, wholly uncharacteristically, _what do you think your parents would say, if they knew what you were doing?_

"If they knew what I was doing, they'd be alive," Erik had retorted, "and we wouldn't even be here."

Moira had idly tipped over a knight with the base of the pawn she still held, and rolled the knight back and forth so the horse's nose knocked hollowly against the board. "You know, this isn't the comic books. I'm not Commissioner Gordon and you're sure as hell not Batman."

"From what I remember, back in the old days Batman turned criminals over to the police," Erik had said. "I'm not that honorable."

"That's true." Moira had laughed, utterly without humor. "Now, I'd appreciate it if you got back up to North Salem where you belong… and if you'd stop doing things to make Levine call me in the middle of the night asking if I know what you're doing."

It wasn't Erik's fault Levine was singularly incompetent. He'd said as much, which only exasperated Moira into further threats.

"And," Erik had said to prove his point, "it's not my fault your GPS tracker's easy to disable."

It had probably not been wise, revealing that particular bit of information. Erik, watching the thinning forest scrolling by outside the window, couldn't quite bring himself to care. Moira had been started, too startled to conceal it, and that had been – and still was – quite satisfying. It meant that Charles was still a secret, and would be, if Erik could keep himself together and not give into temptation again.

The train hitched once and began to slow, and the forest-and-house patchwork resolved more fully into houses and shops, and cars waiting impatiently at the crossings. Overhead, the conductor's announcement for the station blared unintelligibly and around him the other passengers stirred to life. Mechanically, Erik pulled himself out of his seat, fetched his overnight bag (filled now with dirty clothes and one spare gun), and waited for the motion to stop.

Returning to Salem Center – the mindless process of getting his car out of the carpark, sighing as he navigated out into traffic – brought only frustration. _Static_ , Erik thought as he stewed behind the wheel and watched the line of cars snake ahead of him, after two weeks of heady excitement back in Oklahoma and then coming here. Stuck, waiting, nowhere to go, surrounded by a space that never seemed to change. The road wound gently through the rolling forests and fields of the valley, houses peeking through here and there from where they hid at the end of their driveways.

(Moira came to him when he'd been at home – home back then, barely over a month ago, was an anonymous house in an anonymous suburb, a relic of the American craze for tract housing in the fifties – slipping in like she owned the place. Which, Erik supposed, she did; he never inquired too closely about how she found this house or others like it. She'd barely waited for his sarcastic offer of coffee before saying "I've heard about Shaw – Schmidt," she corrected herself, although even for Erik the names blurred now, the identities overlapping, "and it's big. He's back in the States for the first time since – " She broke off, _since he met you_ hanging there unspoken.

"Are you going to do anything about it this time?"

"My case is coming together," Moira said. She ignored the cup of coffee he set in front of her. "I've managed to isolate one of his accountants – a functionary, really, someone who's been helping cook the books. And Shaw'll be in New York at some point. Not sure when, but soon. When he gets here, I'll keep tabs on him until we have something concrete. No use having him skip out on slim evidence."

"So you'll arrest him for cheating on his taxes?" Fury pulled his muscles tight, stringing him along the taut, burning length of it. Moira glanced up at him, then meaningfully over to the silverware drawer, and Erik thought longingly of the gun concealed in it.

"If I can get warrants for his financials," Moira said with implacable calm, "I can get warrants for a whole lot more. And if I have to arrest him for tax fraud, I will."

"And I suppose you're going to New York." Moira's staring at her coffee told him as much. "I'm coming with you, then."

"The hell you are." Her hands were folded together, neat and pristine on Erik's tabletop, her eyes suddenly steady on his and the long lines of her face had set in resolution. "Until I say you're clear, you're staying here – or you're staying in protective custody. Which is where you should be, not out running around and – and – " Moira scowled. "I could have used Quested, you know."

"He never would have turned on Schmidt," Erik said coolly. Some of the tension drained; they were on well-trodden ground again. When he leaned back against the refrigerator, the cool of it leached through his shirt, strange against the heat. "And you knew going into this that some things aren't options for me. Or for you."

"Then," Moira drew a breath and stood. Her head came short of his shoulder, and she was all small, slender bones. Steel, though, and she gazed up at him fearlessly. "You can come with. On my terms.")

The terms had included being chained first to the flat and then to the shop, the purgatory of knowing Schmidt was close-so-close, which was even worse. Moira, Erik told himself, should consider herself lucky he'd listened for so long, long enough for her to set up some kind of cover and move him in.

Long enough, he thought with some despair, for Charles to get bored and wander into town and into Erik's store.

The drive lasted too long and not long enough. Soon enough he found himself pulled up into the parking area behind the flat, a plain and utilitarian space given over to some rust and a tangle of telephone and electric cables, and a slow, perpetual trickle from some leak hidden in the pharmacy next door. Erik studied the weathered brick for a moment before mustering the energy to grab his bag and pull it and himself upstairs.

He did manage this, and was fumbling with his keys when he heard it, a soft scuffling, in the distinctive one-two, one-two beat of human footsteps.

The gun was there, already warming to his hand, when he began to turn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so so so SO sorry this chapter took an unconscionably long time. At the moment my life has descended into the fresh hell of applying for work, and there's nothing like job applications to make you feel tiny, worthless, and incompetent and incapable of doing anything, even writing fanfic. It destroys all that is pure and good in the world :/


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter eleven**

Charles Xavier had never done resignation well. Or at all, really, until now, and he found he didn't like it much.

In the past, he'd buried under layers of action and movement and change, and because Charles was nothing if not committed, that movement and change had taken him a world away from Harvard and disappointment. Constant danger and almost-mortal injury, Charles decided, had a way of refocusing things – too extreme maybe ( _definitely_ too extreme, Raven would say), but it had worked. He'd gone through it and come out better, refined – purged, like gold, or maybe tempered like steel – but the memory of waking up with Raven clinging to him like a limpet also meant he couldn't go through it again.

 _You don't cope, you avoid_. Raven said that a lot, and why she wasn't a psychologist, Charles had no idea.

To _what_ he was resigning himself now, he couldn't precisely say; the drive from the coffee shop back home hadn't sufficed to develop an answer, and the work he had been avoiding for the past week hadn't sufficed either. Resignation to having fallen in love, precipitously and unadvisedly… yes, he decided with some reluctance. With even more, he conceded he'd have resign himself to Raven lecturing him on his bad choices, and to the strange conviction that he couldn't bring himself (and could maybe never bring himself) to admit that choosing Max had, in fact, been a bad choice. Raven would call it Charles's typical and egotistical refusal to admit the possibility that he'd been wrong about something.

That he might be _irrevocably_ in love, on top of all of it… The only solution to that was alcohol and the privacy of his own house.

He'd left for home when the café waitress evicted him from his table. That had also been the point where he'd realized that he'd passed the point where even his obsessive tendencies metamorphosed into something approaching what Raven called _creepy stalkerish behavior_. There was a difference between staying at the lab for three straight days to chase down a theory and parking oneself outside of one's boyfriend's (?) lover's (?) two-night stand's (?) place of business – a difference, Charles supposed, he was not well-equipped to appreciate immediately.

Appreciate it he did, thanks to the waitress and her impatience, which had him back home and somewhat awkwardly holding a bottle of Scotch while talking to Raven's writing group. They had arranged themselves in their usual places, with Darwin on one couch and Angel and Alex on the other, Sean in one of the armchairs. Raven, somewhat worryingly, was nowhere to be seen.

"She's picking up Hank," Angel said, tapping her pen against her thigh. "He was running late with something, so he took another train up."

"Surely you have better things to do with your day than trek all the way out here," Charles said, to say anything. Talk of Hank reminded him uncomfortably of the fact that he'd been skiving on his own work.

"Summer break," Alex grunted.

"And we don't have anything better to drink," Sean added.

"Oh," said Charles.

He considered going to hide in his study again, or possibly his bedroom, but every attempt at movement ran up against the curious, awkward inertia of finding himself the center of attention with nothing to say. It brought up memories of the first few receptions he'd gone to after being discharged, the halting silence as people (people he knew, people he'd known) looked everywhere else except him or made small talk even worse than the silence, like words could break him. Angel was thoughtfully twisting her long, dark hair around a finger and _looking_ at him in a way that said she had things on her mind. Darwin, even from above (Charles had hidden himself behind the sofa), offered him a sympathetic look. For what, Charles could all-too-easily imagine.

"So," he said, "who's being critiqued tonight?"

"I am," Sean sighed. This explained the lack of alcoholic beverage in front of him, although Charles suspected Sean didn't really need it. "This one chapter isn't coming together," he continued, and Charles made a sympathetic noise at that.

"That's all waiting until Raven gets back. What we really want to know," Angel said, "is what's up with tall, scary guy."

Charles made a mental note to remind Raven yet again that certain details of his love life – such as it was – were not conversation material.

"Nothing's _up_." This had the virtue, at least, of being true. "Do you mind if I leave now?"

"She's just worried about you." Darwin's copy of Sean's chapter had multiple, nonsensical doodles in the margins, Charles saw, more doodling than note-taking. "Well, I mean, there's the weird man-of-mystery thing going on, but mostly she's worried."

"Well, she needn't be," Charles said, more than a bit nettled.

"We're worried too," Sean supplied. Alex grunted something irritable from his chair and Sean said, somewhat more defensively, "Raven gets vicious when she gets worried. Like, last week, she chewed up Alex's manhood and spat it out."

"That's very touching, but all the same," Charles began.

"And you have to admit," Angel continued, as if Charles hadn't just spoken, "whatever's going on between you and tall, scary guy is a _lot_ more interesting than anything the rest of us have going on."

"She didn't mean it like that," Darwin said quickly, apparently catching some expression on Charles's face. "It's just, like Sean said, you've been awesome to us and we're worried."

"It'll be fine," Charles said with the most reassuring tone he could muster. "'Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then,' as they say."

Angel caught the reference first and snorted helplessly; the boys, upon being prompted with _Austen, you morons_ joined in. Charles allowed himself to relax, the joke a neatly-built bridge to take him out of here.

Footsteps sounded in the hall, more than a pair. Charles caught Raven's familiar, quick feet, clicking along as though everything were a race and she'd determined to win. More behind her, heavier, more substantial. He looked up.

Raven. Raven with a steely expression on her face and, pulled along in her wake, were Hank and Max.

Max. Instantly, all Charles's attention focused itself on him.

"Look who I found," Raven said, her tone far, far too light. There were fangs in that tone, sharp enough to slide between the ribs. "I was waiting for Hank and there he was."

"You mean I said 'hey, that looks like Max over there,' and you agreed and then you stalked him back to his place," Hank said very quietly. "And you took me with you, which I don't think I'm going to forgive you for doing."

"Details." Raven seized Hank's hand and dragged him over to an empty chair. Hank, wise boy, followed her obediently. "Now," Raven continued once she had herself and Hank situated, "we're going to start working, and you two do… whatever."

Max – Erik – shifted back and forth, every line of him tense and wary. Charles had drawn closer, not quite realizing it, close enough to catch the exhaustion and bitterness in his face, and Charles's drop of intuition said Max had come here expecting nothing good – had been hoping for it, for a chance to make the break. And, Charles knew (and the awareness was sharp, painful enough to jar him), he didn't want that break any more than Charles wanted it.

"We should let them get to work," he said as neutrally as he could, confronted with Max's silent, implacable presence and the curiosity of the writing group. A gesture to the bottle. "And you can help me a bit with this, yes?"

"Of course." Max stepped to the side to let him past. He smelled like the city and the train, a gloss of synthetic fabric and diesel over more intimate sweat. Charles caught the sudden jump of pulse in Max's neck, and remembered placing his mouth there barely a week gone.

The walk to his study lasted forever, and it didn't last long enough. Max took his old seat on the white side of the chessboard, leaning forward to play with one of the rooks he'd captured off of Charles. Charles could feel those pale, remarkable eyes on him, the intensity of Max's focus enough to burn, as he poured their drinks; Max's fingers were dry against his when Charles handed him one of the glasses.

"I still have all those taxidermy specimens," he said, idiotically. "And those paintings, if you still want to look at them." He'd straddled Max in that chair, thighs bracketing thighs – he hadn't done that since high school, it'd been clumsy, Max over six feet of rangy sinew and Charles awkward with how much he'd wanted to kiss him – and Max had clutched Charles to him like drowning.

Max smiled, curiously gentle and sad. Maybe he was remembering too. "I didn't really come here about that."

"I know." Charles wondered how it was possible to be resigned _and_ tense at the same moment, to know the worst was coming but mind strung tight with the desire to avoid it, or maybe bracing for the blow. "And I also… I know the truth, Erik. About the fire, where you're from."

Erik absorbed this in a long silence, no flicker of surprise, only a slow settling into despair. Charles took a sip of his drink and grimaced at the bitterness of it, where it caught unpleasantly against the back of his throat.

"How did you find out?" Erik asked quietly.

"The Internet is a marvelous thing," Charles said. He wondered if it was possible to be pulled apart, caught between vicious tugs of fear and wanting, the wanting and not-wanting to hear Erik's explanation, and the fear of what might be on the other side of whatever explanations Max might offer. "I didn't – I didn't go into this thinking you were lying," he explained. "I only wanted to know."

"Of course you did," Erik said quietly. Charles tried to parse his tone, and couldn't. Sad, admiring, a bit angry – too much.

"Why did you lie?" he asked instead.

"I told you what truth I could." Erik was running absent fingers across a scar that, Charles knew, ran almost the length of his left forearm. Thin as a razor, matched to the track of a tendon – studied, Charles thought with a twist of dread, in its cruelty. "You know – Charles, you know more about me than almost anyone. At any rate, anyone left alive. The only person who _is_ still alive, I would give anything to see dead."

* * *

Charles was leaning forward again, elbows on his knees like that night a week ago. His face, clear-eyed and inquisitive, still invited confidences, and Erik to his consternation found he still wanted to give them.

If Charles was revolted by his confession, that he would gladly see a man dead, he didn't show it. Instead, he asked, "Why? Why the deception?"

"Because it's not safe for you." Because that had been part of his tenuous agreement with Moira, that Erik Lehnsherr would stay dead in the fire that killed his parents. But mostly, Erik realized, it was the sudden, clenching fear of anything happening to Charles.

"Not safe for me?" Charles laughed, short and desperate. "Erik, I'm not Jewish; I don't think Neo-Nazis are really anything I need – "

"It wasn't Neo-Nazis," Erik said, closing his eyes. "Rather worse than that."

"Worse?" Charles asked blankly. "Worse _how_? Are you talking the – the Mafia?" Charles's face did something complicated that suggested he found the entire concept ridiculous.

"You could say that," Erik admitted, "but I would ask you not to, for your own safety. For _Raven's_ , if you don't care about your own."

He wished, suddenly, he were better with words. They were for him, at best, blunt instruments, no nuance to them at all, when what he wanted to say was his entire history, and then, _I didn't want to tell you because Schmidt's taken everything else from me, and he can't have you too._

"I'm not defenseless, Erik," Charles said, a touch of that unexpected steel again. "And in case you haven't noticed – "

"I've noticed," Erik said tightly, "that you have a life. I would prefer that you not lose it."

"Oh for god's sake." Charles set his tumbler down on the chess table, heedless enough to knock over one of the white knights. "If you tell me what it is, and what you were lying about, I could help you, Erik. You could do with friends."

Erik had Moira, who was not precisely friendly, and Levine, who was not especially useful. Then there was Charles, who had between one breath and the next made himself necessary to Erik's existence. He searched Charles's face and got nothing back except sincerity, the maddening kind that gave nothing away except Charles's resolve and gods-be-damned stubbornness.

Charles offered him a slight grin, the kind that was more in the corners of his mouth and his eyes but no less honest for it. The turn of his lips said he knew Erik knew he'd given in, and looking at him – sturdy, solid, far more dependable than anything in Erik's life except revenge – Erik gave way.

"I met Sebastian Shaw – Klaus Schmidt, he goes by both – when I was looking for internships after my undergraduate," he said. With the words he saw Shaw in his office, Emma Frost's crystalline presence bright against the dark, exotic wood of the walls and desk, Shaw behind that desk smiling a welcome and extending a hand to draw Erik in. "He took me out to dinner one night and I saw… things I shouldn't have."

(He had seen _and_ heard, stumbling into Shaw's private study while wandering the impossible labyrinth of Shaw's penthouse – a data stick, almost hopelessly obsolete by now, even if it had survived, a conversation between Shaw and another guest Erik hadn't seen, a guest who had died quietly, choking on drugs and his own fear.)

"The next morning, I turned down Shaw's offer." Shaw had been icily polite, hostility behind his gray eyes and cordial wishes for Erik's successful future. "Not even a week later, my parents were dead."

(He hadn't been home; he'd been walking back from his evening jog when he'd seen the smoke. Even imagining his parents' screams cut him to the heart and woke him up on the handful of nights he slept deeply enough to dream.)

"Shaw came to me with a proposition. I could live and work for him, or I could die like my parents." He'd come close to telling Shaw to kill him, but then rebellion had risen up, clean-burning and hot enough to clean everything from him except the rage and the will to live. "I agreed."

"Jesus." Charles had his fingers laced together, right thumb running across the back of his left. Erik searched for the pity and found only compassion. He didn't entirely know if that was worse.

"I've stayed alive this long," Erik said. Alongside the relief, the old anger welled up again, "and I plan to stay alive long enough to see Shaw dead."

"I suppose the justice system wouldn't suffice for you," Charles said, unreadable.

"There _is_ no justice in this world." Maybe there was for people like Charles, who didn't have much to fear, and even if they did, they could bulldoze the source of that fear into oblivion. "No evidence ties Shaw to my parents' deaths, or to the dozens – the _hundreds_ – of others either at his hands or by his orders. He thinks he's above justice because he _is_ … but Charles, he's not above _me_. He's mortal, like the rest of us."

Charles opened his mouth to say something, closed it again. Indecision sat oddly on his face.

"Killing Shaw won't bring you peace, you know," he said at last. _Peace was never an option_ , Erik thought, despairing and accepting both at once, and Charles added, "I wish, though, that I could help – "

A banging at the door, then, and Erik lurched to his feet, and in the space between the sound and registering the fact of a new presence he saw Moira, Shaw, Frost, a kaleidoscope of danger.

Raven, it was only Raven, every bit as determined as she'd been when she'd cornered him at his apartment barely two hours ago, armed with a fearsome expression and a pile of papers tucked under her arm. She swept up to Charles, favoring Erik with a brief glare, before redirecting her attention to her brother. Worry, Erik saw, it was right there in the swift inspection she gave Charles's face as if searching out wounds or bruises.

"Raven," Charles said impatiently, "what _is_ it?"

"Charles." Raven thrust an open envelope and two folded pieces of paper at him. "You've been neglecting your mail while you've been pining," she spared a vicious scowl for Erik, "and it's building up. Now, that manila one – that's that Stark weirdo, about some kind of joint project _again_ … Cable bill, phone bill… that guy who does the slate tiles about the roof, he has the estimate ready… Bill, one of your nerd magazines…"

"Where's your writing group? Also, I thought you weren't my personal secretary," Charles said, and Erik could almost be amused.

"Getting drunk. Another nerd magazine," Raven said, turning conveniently deaf to her brother's annoyance. The _Proceedings of the American Genetics Society_ hit the side table with a thwap. Charles sighed.

"Oh looky, some douche wants you to schmooze with him and give him money for it." Raven scowled at a pale blue envelope bristling with tissue paper and silver calligraphy. "Winston Frost and the Friends of Humanity and a bunch of other rich assholes 'cordially request the _honor_ your attendance at a fund-raising dinner for Senator Robert Kelly's re-election campaign' at Sun Ridge, and hey, it's only eight hundred bucks a plate. They want your RSVP by tomorrow. Should I tell them to go screw themselves? Can I?"

Charles said something, what it was, Erik couldn't say.

The name, that name, _Winston Frost_ , he knew it.

One time in Argentina, Emma had mentioned her parents, _truly marvelous individuals… they taught me everything I know_ , and his own research had turned them up: Winston and Hazel Frost. Like Shaw, they had the protection of money and influence; Frost Corporation had gone international before Emma had even been born, its profits sufficient to shield its owners from any official who might go poking. Officials like misguided Moira, Erik thought bitterly.

"You said…" The breath he took for calmness didn't help. "You said Winston Frost?"

"Yeah, I did," Raven said belligerently, sidling closer to Charles. "What's it to you?"

"Raven, could you please leave?"

Charles's voice cracked with authority. Raven's eyes widened with indignation, but she obediently left, almost unobtrusive before she slammed the door behind her.

"Erik?" Charles asked. "Erik, what is it?"

"If you want to help," Erik said slowly, _if you want to die_ , "there's something you can do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, we're coming down to the wire, at long last! I actually have the last few chapters and the conclusion roughed out, so it shouldn't be a dismally long time before the next update.
> 
> Thank you so much to all you lovely people for kudos'ing and commenting! I mostly hide out in this fandom, because I am boring, and it's so wonderful to know that there are people out there reading and enjoying this piece of nonsense that was supposed to be fluff and ended up being all weirdly angsty romantic tragicomedramaspense.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter twelve**

"Please explain to me," Charles said, "why, exactly, I should help you get yourself killed or arrested."

"You wouldn't be helping me do either of those things." Erik was dry as dust and utterly infuriating. "You _would_ be in a position to help me acquire information."

"Which, in turn, would help you get yourself killed or arrested."

"It would _help_ me find Schmidt, and that's what matters here."

"Forgive me if I disagree with you," Charles said with as much sarcasm as he could. Erik's expression was one of surprise, annoyance, and fury; it was, Charles found, unexpectedly gratifying despite the situation. "There are so many more things that matter, that are more important than revenge."

"And what would those be? Please, Charles, enlighten me." Erik leaned back in his chair, hands steepled, long fingers pressed together, elbows resting on the arm of the chair. His eyes glittered, keen even in the soft light of the study.

Frustration translated to energy. Where Erik was still, the picture of rapt (and completely insincere) attention, Charles had to move; the library, large as it was, couldn't contain his restlessness or all the things he wanted to put into words, _the past two weeks, what he felt, what he knew Erik felt, how someone as casually and simplistically evil as Schmidt-Shaw-whoever didn't deserve the sacrifice of Erik's life_. He paused by a shelf of non-fiction, not really seeing the titles. Behind him, Erik sat silently.

"Schmidt isn't worth you dying," he said at last, despite the difficulty at his throat. "And you sacrificing yourself… it won't bring you peace. It won't bring you anything."

"I'm past caring about that," Erik said bluntly.

"Are you past caring about _me_ , then?"

He hadn't meant to ask that. When he turned to apologize and edit himself, because that entire question was ridiculous and presumptuous and too many other embarrassing things for Charles to count, Erik was staring at him.

Not much ever got past Erik's control, Charles knew, the result, probably, of years throttling back the rage and loss that burned in him (don't give Schmidt the satisfaction, he could imagine Erik telling himself) and erasing his own history even as it drove him on. But this, this – this was Erik's grey eyes wide and bright with surprise and hurt and bitter longing, his mouth soft with it. And, Charles realized with a shock that was like thunder, the sky breaking open over him, _Erik wasn't_. He wasn't past caring, and that was why he was here, on account of Charles and not Raven's bullying, here against every impulse and every scrap of purpose that kept him pointed at his goal.

As quickly as Charles read the truth, it vanished. Erik folded in on himself, cool once again and the edges of him sharp with disdain. He stood up, graceful, beautiful, _what is wrong with you Xavier_ , and Charles _saw_ the thoughts chasing through him, how Erik alchemized concern-loss-love into anger that Charles was trying to manipulate him, low-burning fury at his own weakness, and resolve.

"I never had the right to ask you in the first place," Erik said. The disappointment in his voice stung, but it was a minor accent against the fear that welled up as Erik collected his jacket and made for the door.

"I'll go," and so what if he sounded desperate; the words escaped from him before he knew to speak them. It got Erik's attention at least, the renewed, sharp edge of his focus. Charles continued, somewhat more calmly, "Tell me who to look for, what you want to know, and I'll do it. But -- but you're staying away."

"You think," Erik said with a sour incredulity, "you can tell me what to do?"

"I'm offering you a choice." He made himself meet those pale, predatory eyes; he had the sense of being under unsteady tons of concrete, disaster waiting for one wrong move to come crashing down. "I'm not saying you have to take it, but I _am_ pointing out that there are certain advantages to you letting me go in by myself and your staying out of the picture. Advantages," he added with some maliciousness, "you clearly don't appreciate at the moment."

"Like what?" Erik asked, obviously nettled – but hooked, that was the important thing.

"First, there's no guarantee that Schmidt will be there, but _every_ guarantee that security will be tight, given the presence of Senator Kelly. For that matter, there's no guarantee your Miss Frost will be there, either." Charles kept himself steady, hid the flash of triumph at the momentary doubt on Erik's face. "Second, I'm fairly sure I can fake my way through being civil to people I don't particularly care for, unlike yourself. Third," he had to continue over Erik's attempts at objection, "third, what if Schmidt were there? Would you really endanger dozens of civilians and innocent people?"

"Oh, come _on_ ," Erik scoffed. "Do you honestly think they're innocent?"

"Of killing your parents? Yes, I do. I don't have your head for conspiracies, I'm afraid." That was low, too low, but Charles refused to take it back. "Those are my terms, Erik, and that's the deal. Take it or leave it."

 

"You'll do this for me." The words had the curious flatness that said they hovered between statement and question, as if Erik couldn't believe him but didn't want to push for clarification. "Despite what it'll mean."

"I said so, didn't I?" Charles said tightly. "On that condition, _and on your word_ that you won't be anywhere near the Frosts and Kelly that night, I'll do it."

Erik hesitated.

"I won't stop you leaving," Charles said impulsively, "and I won't report you, because I know you won't endanger your mission by unnecessarily hurting people." He thought, anyway; there was a light in Erik's eye that suggested he might at least consider it. "I won't stop you, however much I wish I could."

Erik moved closer, and that _was_ disbelief now. He'd set his jaw as if to keep back whatever he wanted to say, and close enough now – close so Charles could touch him if he wanted, which he _did_ want – Charles picked out the conflict and gratitude, written on Erik's face clear as day. _Are you sure?_ The question wasn't much more than breath, and Charles shouldn't be sure, because the entire thing was mad (mad, mad, sodding _mad_ ), but he knew his own mind well enough to know he was.

He was also, probably, about to do a very foolish, ill-advised thing, and he would never hear the end of it from Raven.

"I don't know what it says about me," Charles sighed, "that I'm having to sacrifice my conscience by giving eight hundred dollars to a person like Senator Kelly. The thought of helping you do something incredibly, incredibly stupid and illegal seems like a very small thing."

"Your sacrifice of conscience is much appreciated," Erik said, an ironic touch to the corner of his mouth.

"Well, I shall take my tuxedo to the dry cleaners, then," Charles said, and couldn't help the smile. Erik made a soft, aggrieved noise, but didn't press the issue further, which was an intelligent thing of him to do.

Having Erik _thisclose_ was its own kind of drug, and already high on it, Charles pulled him in. The kick low in his gut when Erik kissed him, the desperate breath that shook against his mouth when Erik opened up – it was power, Charles thought, giddy at the thought already, and knowing that he was going to do something beautifully, perfectly reckless for the first time in years – that was, at least until he got his hands under Erik's shirt and felt Erik quiver and hitch against him, almost the best thing in the world.

* * *

Charles and Moira, Erik thought with no little annoyance, would get on like a house on fire.

A week to go before the fund-raiser, and he found himself back in the shop, writing prices on more postcards while under the uncomfortable, beady scrutiny of the taxidermied badger perched on the cashdesk. That Erik would continue to work at the shop and eat up hours selling trinkets to tourists and the bored housewives of Westchester County had, apparently, been in a sub-clause he hadn't caught the first time around, with Charles clinging to him and whispering feverish, encouraging things in his ear.

"You need to at least act like a normal person, even if you aren't," had been Charles's orders, disguised as helpful, if patronizing advice and delivered along with the badger, a chipmunk, an ocelot, and a coelacanth. "I think your friend, the unpleasant one, is starting to suspect."

That would be Levine, who'd retreated to a new bed and breakfast after telling Erik exactly what he was going to do to him if Erik skipped town again. Charles had come up – "I don't know what the hell you think you're doing with that guy, but knock it off" – and the taxidermy collection had been for some kind of cover, proof that Erik's relationship with Charles had been purely business.

Pulling Charles into his business still made his stomach turn sick, slow circles when he thought about it. Not for the first time, he considered telling Moira what he was doing, if only for Charles's safety; images of Charles dead at Schmidt's hand (or Schmidt's orders, which amounted to one and the same in Erik's head, but the picture involved Charles lying unnaturally still and blood, and Schmidt gloating over him) had him picking up the phone, his thumb hovering over the speed-dial, before he controlled himself enough to put it down.

Like now, the phone a foreign weight in his hand. He set it back in its cradle with a click, made himself breathe through the fear.

Speaking of, he couldn't work out of Charles was mad or stupid, not to be afraid of this – of _him_. When Erik had said as much that night, with Charles pulling impatiently at his shirt buttons, Charles had stared up at him with honest incomprehension and said, "Erik, _please_ give me some credit for being stronger than I look," enough bite in the words to tell Erik to drop it.

Underestimating Charles, Erik thought as he absently shuffled postcards, was perilously easy to do.

The cowbell on the door jangled, abrupt as the kick of his heart.

It was only Levine, in a dark Stanford t-shirt that set off his pale skin to disadvantage and jeans. He sat down heavily on the stool usually occupied by Charles. His face was sallow – the man must have been bred in a laboratory, a strain of humans meant to exist only in offices, his skin gained that little color – and shadowed with purple under his eyes. Perpetual worry, that was Levine. Erik ignored him and continued to catalog.

"Moira'll be back next week," Levine said, after a cautious glance to make sure no one else was in the shop. It was Friday morning, too early for tourists to come by and too early for people making weekend escapes from the city. When it became clear Levine was waiting for some kind of acknowledgment, Erik made a noncommittal noise. "There's talk you'll be moved."

"Good luck with that." It had to have something to do with the Frosts and their fund-raiser, it _had_ to. Erik kept his face empty of everything except boredom, started to formulate plans if leaving became necessary.

Telling Charles the entire plan was off – the mission, as Charles referred to it, reconnaissance – was first on the list. Sending Charles into that, without Erik at least nearby, close enough to avenge if not to save (and he wasn't thinking about that, was not going there)… no. Erik made himself relax his grip on his pencil. And never mind that Charles was going of his own will; Erik's conviction that he was somehow coercing him into this had sent Charles into a laughing fit for five minutes, and really, Charles Xavier was not a man who could be ordered, or coerced, into anything.

 _You're absolutely infuriating_ , he'd said to Charles that night, and on the few occasions since, like yesterday when he'd been able to push Charles into a corner and keep him there, and Charles had smirked up at him and said _Oh, I'm well aware of that_ before leaning up for a kiss and snaking his hands under the waist of Erik's jeans.

"I'm also aware of what I'm getting into," he'd said somewhat later, after Erik had put up the _We're closed_ sign and gotten them both upstairs (and thrown away the unfortunate antique doily that had been a casualty of Charles's enthusiasm). "You forget, I grew up with these people. Maybe not international criminals – I don't think, anyway – but I know how they work. I can take care of myself."

It was a salutary reminder that Charles was, not so deep down, a subtle and manipulative bastard when he wanted to be.

Levine left after a while, bored with Erik's refusal to talk about anything other than the shop and people's disturbing enthusiasm for antique dead animals. Erik considered calling Moira to tell her Levine milling around pointlessly in Salem Center surely had to attract more attention than it was worth, but their last conversation, and the memory of Moira worn down to the last fraying threads of her patience (and the possibility of his complaints bringing her back early), kept him silent on that score, too. He'd find a way out from under Levine easy enough.

Another jangle at the door, but this one followed quickly by a cheerful greeting as Charles shouldered through. Erik allowed himself a smile, the small, private one he never offered anyone else. It won an answering grin, Charles more unreserved, from over the top of yet another cardboard box filled with stuffed woodland creatures.

"I'm not entirely sure some of these are, ah, completely _legal_ ," Charles said, plunking the box down on the cashdesk with a huff. A woodchuck peered up at Erik from under the neck of a – "What _is_ that?"

"Capybara," Charles said. "As I was saying, my great-great grandfather was something of an, um, enthusiast when it came to collecting. He was a biologist – his name was also Charles, which is quite interesting, don't you think? – and while working at the Natural History Museum in London… well, I'm afraid impulse control was not his strong suit, if you believe the family stories."

"Impulse control doesn't seem to be your family's strong suit," Erik observed.

"Thank you for that." Charles set the capybara, a field rat, and a weasel on the counter, followed by a few small birds that had fallen to the bottom of the box. "Great-great grandfather's specialty was _Rodentia_ , in case you can't tell. He had a particular fondness for weasels; I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it was something of an unwritten rule that gentlemen academics in the nineteenth century had to be eccentric."

"So you would have fit in quite nicely."

"And you would have made an excellent Gothic romantic hero, with the mysterious past and the brooding and all of it."

The look Charles directed at him from under his fringe was teasing, warm, something to respond to. Erik leaned forward, a demand for a kiss that Charles granted, sleek and slick with Charles opening easily to his mouth and sliding his tongue across Erik's to invite him in. He tasted Charles's amusement, felt it like something humming above the surface of skin, enticing like the first, sweet hum of alcohol hitting the blood. When he pulled back, Charles was beautifully flushed, mouth soft and bitten-red from the hint of Erik's teeth.

"Brooding, Charles?" he asked, and licked his lips to chase the taste of Charles across them.

"Hm, you'd look quite nice in a cravat," Charles murmured, hot-eyed and tracing the length of Erik's throat with his fingers. When Erik sighed and craned his neck, Charles made a soft, broken noise and leaned closer to nose beneath the line of his jaw.

In some other reality, Erik thought hazily, they might take over the world, Charles made him feel that powerful. Charles's fingers laced through his hair, brushing the sensitive skin at the back of his neck and his palm cupped warm around Erik's cheek – Charles had capable hands, unexpected calluses on thumb and index finger – and they would, Erik decided, they would do this, Erik and this utterly impossible man.

"You realize, of course, that you are completely insane," Erik told him when they broke apart.

"I've been told this many times," Charles said gravely, drawing back for a moment before kissing him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to try really hard not to rush the ending too much, but ahhhhhh the next couple of chapters are what I've been stumbling toward for the past two months, and I'm REALLY REALLY EXCITED, OKAY!?
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone for reading, kudos'ing, and commenting, as always. That you're enjoying the trip so far is lovely to know.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter thirteen**

The evening of the fundraiser came swiftly. Charles, fidgeting with his cufflinks, hovered between anxiety (mostly at the prospect of doing something to render Erik dead or in federal custody) and an excitement that, according to Raven, boded well for no one.

"I don't suppose you're going to tell me where you're going," she said from her station next to his mirror. "And your hair always looks ridiculous, so don't even bother trying to straighten it."

"Not this time, and what do you mean about my hair?" Raven kept in ignorance was intolerable, but less so than Raven should she find out, first, where Charles was going, and second, the reason why. Charles reminded himself that the car was to pick him up in twenty minutes.

"Well, let's see… You're not going on a date, since your boyfriend's lurking down in the kitchen," Raven said consideringly. Charles sighed. Part of their deal had been Erik staying at the house – Erik's stipulation, issued from a paranoia with depths Charles despaired of ever plumbing. "You hate fancy parties, so you'd only go if this was important. You never wear your tux if you can help it, and especially not to your nerd conventions, so it isn't that. Important, but not boyfriend- or science-related… Is it for the Foundation?"

"Prospective donors," Charles mumbled. "I wasn't going to go at first, but then I decided I ought." He couldn't make himself look Raven in the eye.

"Uh _huh_ ," Raven said with soul-withering sarcasm.

"We suffered a bit in the downturn like everybody else." Maybe, Charles thought, if he stared hard enough at his reflection he could make himself believe his own lie, even if Raven clearly wouldn't. "Not badly, but it would be nice to have a cushion, and get it while people are feeling generous."

"Hmph."

Raven had curled in on herself, knees tucked up under her chin and folded together by her arms. A memory danced through his head, unexpectedly keen, of her huddled behind a curtained window seat – hiding from Cain and his persecutions, or Kurt's never-ending disapproval – and him finding her there. She had been sitting precisely like this, staring dully out onto a rainy day, utterly beyond comfort, and Charles had budged up alongside her and sat there with her for a while.

"I won't be late. After all, it'll just be boring, stuffy people banging on about their investments and going skiing in St. Moritz," he added, trying for levity. Raven _hmphed_ again; the smile she offered him was thin.

He kissed her on the top of her head anyway, her red hair soft beneath his mouth. "Don't torment Max too much."

"I make no promises," Raven said, but at least there was laughter this time.

Downstairs the bell rang for the car. Charles would have gone there directly if it weren't for Erik – very easy to think of him as Erik now; he really didn't look much like a Max at all, Charles decided – intercepting him in the atrium, manifesting himself from out of nowhere like a ghost. As always, Erik's face was beyond difficult to interpret, dry affection and worry and half a wish to take back his request. It was mostly affection, though, legible in the finger Erik ran along Charles's cuff and lingered over the silver cufflink, tugging at it thoughtfully.

"I wouldn't have thought you'd be so presentable," Erik said.

"Yes, well," Charles adjusted his jacket, "I'm no James Bond, but I'll do, I suppose."

"You'll more than do."

Erik kissed him, and _oh_ , he'd never get used to this but could spend his life trying, Erik's long mouth slanting generously over his, the slick and sudden slide of his tongue along Charles's lips and then between them. He gave serious, if hazy, thought to being fashionably late – more than, with the promise of Erik's clever, clever hands tugging at his jacket and imagining them unknotting his tie and then undoing the buttons of his shirt, one by one.

"You should get going," Erik murmured. "The car'll leave without you."

"'S my car," Charles said, leaning up for another kiss. Erik's fingers, now stroking insistently along Charles's neck, made thinking of being anywhere else – let alone leaving to go there – difficult.

Erik gently, inexorably, pushed him back. "Good luck," he said, voice brimming with that rough affection and fear, sharpening it as he said, "Call me instantly if anything – if _anything_ happens."

"The worst that'll happen is I die of a rage-induced aneurysm listening to those people," Charles said. It didn't seem to soothe Erik much. "Don't let Raven drive you too crazy."

"Easier said than done."

Leaving was also easier said than done, but he managed it. The ride went quickly, the driver (hired for the occasion) mercifully silent, even if he had failed to step out of the car to open the door for Charles. He spoke only once, confirming Charles's destination and departure time in a rough, accented voice. Before the open panel between the front and back seats whirred shut, Charles caught sight of reddish skin, mottled as if burned, above the high white collar.

A half-hour later saw them fetching up at a wrought-iron gate, its palisaded tops pointed with many-rayed suns and shooting stars. Less decorative, and far more menacing, were the security men posted there, who inspected Charles's identification and invitation with poorly-concealed mistrust. For a moment, Charles imagined they had read his thoughts and saw his true purpose there and worse were in league with Schmidt-Shaw-whatever-his-name-was, but with a grunt the stockier and more hostile of the two agents handed him back his paperwork and let them through.

The house at Sun Ridge loomed over its gardens and hedges, a pile of pseudo-Gothic stone like a cathedral exiled from Europe. White tents had been scattered throughout the garden, capsules of golden light that illuminated the summer roses and lilies and the rich people who moved around them. Jewelry flashed and so did crystal, as bright and glittering as the laughter of the people on which they shone, all the talk of wealth and how to keep it, the war, plans for the future.

"Dr. Xavier," said a voice from one of the tents, "what a pleasure _and_ a surprise."

Like the voice, the face was sleek and patrician, cold blue eyes glittering under hair that might once have been blond but had since gone white. Charles racked his memory for a name to go with it, but the man offered his name along with his hand.

"Winston Frost," the man said. Charles retracted his hand as soon as was polite. Winston smirked. "As I said, Dr. Xavier, a pleasure and a surprise. I'd thought that we stood quite on the… ah, opposite side of matters, shall we say."

"Times change," Charles said vaguely, and added something about leadership in difficult circumstances.

"Of course, of course," Winston said smoothly. He gestured to a passing waiter and took two champagne flutes; one he used to gesture impatiently at the waiter, who departed in a white-coated flurry, the other one he pressed on Charles, who accepted it as if it were poison. "And," Winston continued, bestowing on Charles a benignant smile that froze upon reaching his eyes, "who better to look to than Senator Kelly, eh?"

"No one I can think of." Charles sipped at the champagne, dry and bitter on his tongue, sparking when the bubbles popped. "How is your family? I know we don't travel in the same circles, quite, but I understand your daughter has a promising career."

"Emma? Oh, she makes herself indispensable wherever she goes." Winston's smile had the barest suggestion of teeth in it now. "She's here tonight, as a matter of fact, although rather preoccupied… It's a shame the two of you couldn't spend more time together at Harvard, considering everything that's happened since."

Charles offered Winston his most philosophical smile. Of course the man knew about his past, had probably had his dossier on his desk within minutes of Charles's RSVP arriving there. He said something else vague and manufactured about fate and circumstance, and after all, things had come out all right in the end. He meant to say more – about growing experiences and the importance of service – but a man and woman had insinuated themselves into the corner of the conversation, and Charles knew, _knew_ , with every ounce of intuition in him, that Schmidt and Emma Frost had joined them.

"Ah," Winston boomed, gesturing for them to step forward, "speak of the devil, and she appears. My darling Emma, were your ears burning? Dr. Xavier here and I were just speaking of you."

"Were you? I hope it was good things." Emma Frost gliding forward, coolly resplendent in white and silver and diamonds, her throat almost encrusted with a necklace of diamonds and watery sapphires. Like her father, her hair was pale and her eyes the blue of the sky seen through ice; her smile, and the smile of Shaw next to her, were thin skins of ice over danger. "I heard your name around campus at Harvard, of course, even if we never did meet very much. Sebastian, I don't believe I've ever mentioned him to you, but this is Charles Xavier."

"Indeed, you haven't mentioned him, although _your_ reputation precedes you, Dr. Xavier," Shaw – so, Charles thought, it was to be Shaw tonight. "I'm only a layman, but I've always been intrigued by… change. Adaptation to suit the circumstances – such an important lesson, wouldn't you say?"

"An important lesson for all of us!" Winston exclaimed, and raised his glass of champagne. "Perhaps we ought to toast to it."

Emma smiled thinly, but procured herself and Shaw their own glasses. The champagne went down worse this time, stinging at the back of his throat. Shaw drank with evident amusement, light brown eyes fixed on Charles over the rim of his glass.

"What have you been doing with yourself, Emma?" Charles made himself ask. Shaw finished his drink with a satisfied sigh, and waved for another.

"Oh, traveling here and there, helping Daddy with some things for the company – we're looking to expand our international presence, you know."

"I'd heard." He hadn't. "How did you meet Mr. Shaw?"

"Common interests," Shaw interjected smoothly. His right arm insinuated itself around Emma's waist. Anything human might have responded to it, either to move closer or move away, but Emma was a statue. "Not just money, of course, but Emma has _the_ most incredible mind." The hand at her waist migrated up her side, her neck, to toy with her hair, pulling a strand of it free of its coif. Shaw hummed happily. "It's a pleasure working with her."

"Are you here long?" Charles hid his interest behind his champagne glass. "I'm sure Salem Center is boring next to the city, but I'm sure – "

"Oh, Emma's staying with her old dad for a few days," Winston said, sounding almost affectionate. "And Sebastian and I have some things we've been working on."

"Exciting things, I hope."

"Oh, very exciting," Shaw said, dragging his smile from Emma long enough to fix it on Winston.

To most eyes, Charles supposed he would have been an average, middle-aged man, beginning to thin out as age bled the curves from his face and tightened the skin to wrinkles in the corners of his eyes and mouth. _Benign_ , he thought, as Shaw smiled in response to something Emma said, the kindness of a man who saw himself superior to all around him and as unchallenged in that superiority. He saw himself through Shaw's eyes, a young man brimming over with idealism and sheltered by the academy, the naïve sort of prey that wouldn't see the danger until too late – was this, he wondered, what he had seen in Erik originally, and what had compelled him to draw Erik into his trap?

 _Erik_. He smiled robotically in response to something Shaw said about Charles's work, and launched into the spiel he had prepared for speaking with non-scientists about what he did. His mouth reeled it off, the words tumbling out – the relationship between genes and environment, response to change on the genetic level – and thought the entire time _I hate you, I hate you_ with a fury almost alien to him, and he could, in that instant, have seen Shaw dead – "Emma's blue eyes, for example, are a result of the suppression of the OCA2 gene by the HERC2 gene, while the expression of your OCA2 gene, Mr. Shaw, has not reduced the production of melanin to the same degree" – and would have done it himself, would have been fiercely, terribly glad to do it.

"That's all very fascinating," Shaw said when Charles had finished. "Really, quite remarkable how all you scientists figure these things out, isn't it, Emma?"

"Very," Emma said.

"I would very much like to stay and talk, but unfortunately…" The smile Shaw offered Charles slid across his face like oil, gleamed in his teeth and stagnated there. "Unfortunately, I have to go show my support for Senator Kelly – and by support, I mean my checkbook. If you'll excuse me?"

"Of course," Charles said, too shaken to say anything more. "Good evening to you."

Once Shaw and Emma had left, a cloud of self-satisfaction left behind them, Charles found it easy enough to escape from Winston and avoid speaking to most of the other guests. He found a corner where he might stand unharassed, another glass of wine – not to drink, just to have something to hold – and a napkin with crackers and caviar that made him ill to think about.

He had to tell Erik. His cell phone was in his pocket; he could call now. He should _leave_ now, call the driver and get home as fast as possible. He should, Charles supposed, actually call the police, or beg Erik to call them, anything other than tell Erik the one thing Erik most wanted to hear, that Shaw was here, not twenty miles away.

Shaw and Emma stood across the courtyard, almost opposite him, Emma statuesque as the marble nymph behind her, glittering and cold where Shaw was dark. When Emma tucked the lock of hair that Shaw had disarranged back into place, more diamonds shone on her wrist, sparking prismatically in the torches. Other, anonymous faces had ranged around them, mostly old men and mostly all of them besotted with Emma. Charles wondered if Kelly knew what sort of people he had here, and if he did know, if he cared.

A young woman, having detached herself from a knot of businessmen, broke his line of sight with Shaw. She paused in the floodlights, reaching distractedly for her shawl, which had fallen from the crook of her elbow and begun to trail on the flagstones.

Her hair was neatly caught up in a complicated clip of silver and pearls – her _auburn_ hair, and Charles remembered, very acutely, an unadvisedly large quantity of alcohol and a line about the MCR1 gene – and a few years later, another unadvisedly large quantity of alcohol and heartbreak.

The woman, having corrected her shawl, hurried across the front lawn, heading for the stairs that would take her down to where the cars waited. She didn't hurry, precisely, but her step was long and quick and confident despite the interference of high heels and her long blue dress. Charles also knew that peculiar, competent grace, and the momentary hesitation – he remembered this too, from years ago – as she paused to look over her shoulder, as if fearful of being followed.

 _What is she doing here?_ That she would be here made as much sense as his own presence.

Raven would murder him and her if she ever found out about this – and she would – at some point, but Charles, when activated by love, a broken heart, or curiosity, couldn't do anything but act.

He started out from his refuge in the shadows, head down to ignore anyone who might want to speak with him. Shaw and Emma were still deep in conversation, still superior and still bored. The light had collected itself around the tents, cut off abruptly as Charles neared the end of a hedge and the top of the stairs. The woman was at the foot of the stairs by now, moving a bit more cautiously because of the gravel.

"Wait!"

She froze, hands fisted tight in her dress, and turned, and the surprise on her face (visible despite the darkness, in the way the light caught in her wide brown eyes) was almost as comical as his own.

" _Charles_?"

"Moira?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens!


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter fourteen**

In addition to being a scientist who rebelled against the invocation of genetics to explain every little personal quirk and quibble, Charles also rebelled against careless Western invocations of karma to explain every unfortunate (or fortunate) circumstance. As an atheist, he felt the same way about foisting responsibility for good and bad on a deity who, as far as Charles could see, might not actually be all that interested in the daily life of the average _Homo sapiens_. Despite the admittedly uncertain philosophical and epistemological considerations surrounding its understanding of causality, correlation, and coincidence, Charles would have taken empiricism any day of the week.

All the same, it was very difficult to stand on a half-dark lawn and talk with his former girlfriend, almost-fiancée, and former love of his life, for the first time in ten years and not think that some cosmic or higher power had decided to meddle. Add in the fact that he was here under decidedly shady pretenses, namely helping a fugitive from the law and organized crime get information on his mortal enemy, and if a missionary had come by preaching his particular brand of faith, Charles would give serious thought to converting.

"I never thought you would go over to the dark side," Moira said. She had his measure in one comprehensive glance, neatly combed hair to tuxedo to shining shoes. It occurred to Charles that she'd seen him with his hair brushed maybe twice. Moira added, the mind-reader, "It doesn't look good on you."

"I haven't," Charles said, even as he cast desperately around for some kind of plausible excuse, or an excuse that didn't involve invoking Erik. "Keeping an eye on the enemy and all."

"Mmm-hm." Moira invested the hum with a wealth of skepticism.

"Anyway, I could say the same about you." He glanced pointedly back over his shoulder at the glittering lights and the laughter up in the courtyard. "I can't imagine you coming here as someone's plus-one."

"Work," Moira snapped.

Her dress was long, dark blue, elegant, and not at all Moira-like. Her high heels were also not Moira-like, although the fact that she had paused to take them off and they now dangled from her left hand, was. The terseness was also classic Moira. If it hadn't been for his own excruciating awareness of Sebastian Shaw back at the party, making nice with a respected politician while Erik stewed back at the house – or, for that matter, a decade of rather more painful history – they could have been back at Harvard, at the beginning or end of an argument that would have ended either with the two of them in bed or one of them stalking out the door.

"I…" He shifted against the discomfort of her scrutiny and the memories. His lower back twinged a reminder at him. "How have you been?"

"Okay." Moira softened a little, her mouth stretching into a tentative smile before it faded again. "I had no idea you were in New York. The last time I heard, you were in England."

"I finished my doctorate." For lack of anything better to do with them, Charles shoved his hands in his pockets. "What did you end up doing?"

"Political science," Moira said absently. She shook herself and said, more directly this time, "Charles, what _are_ you doing here?"

"I didn't know I needed to explain myself." It was his turn to be short, and in a low, mean way, he enjoyed it.

"Tonight," Moira said, "you might need to." She stepped closer and took him by the arm, tugging him over to the valet stand, where a bored-looking and acne-pocked teenager presided over the keys. Moira thrust her tag at him, along with a demand to get her car and be quick about it. "Believe me, this is _not_ a night where I want surprises," she muttered, half to herself.

"I don't like those nights in general," Charles said crossly, and tugged his arm loose. "Is there any particular reason why you're abducting me?"

"There are people here…" Moira trailed off as she studied the drivers collected nearby, most of them smoking and some of them laughing in response to a joke. "Charles, go find your driver and tell him you're finding another way home."

Her tone had the old edge to it, the one that said gainsaying her would be dangerous, and he had loved that about her, her intensity. Now, he didn't know what to make of it, but her softer, _please, Charles_ got his attention and, after a moment's consideration, his obedience, and he trotted over to where the drivers had gathered, a bit self-conscious when they turned their attention on him and the laughter faded out.

Charles picked out his own driver as the man stepped into the light to check something – his watch, Charles realized, which was silver and flared brightly under the halogens – and in the downlights the man's neck was a painful-looking red; what skin Charles could see in the shadows under the cap had a dull, leathery sheen, as if it had been tanned, or maybe burned.

"I – I've made other arrangements for getting home," he said to the shadows and the eyes glittering under the brim of the cap. The driver's right hand, twisted under its glove, brushed the cuff of his left sleeve back down over his wrist. "I'll call the company and have them bill me for the full night anyway, for the inconvenience. And you'll receive a tip for the full evening, of course."

"Of course," the driver said. "I hope you have a good evening."

"You too," Charles said, and felt like an idiot.

Both the car and Moira were waiting for him when he got back to the valet stand, Moira already behind the driver's seat of a sleek Aston Martin and already worked up to a fever pitch of impatience by the time Charles slid in beside her.

"Was that your driver?" she hissed the second Charles closed his door.

"Not _my_ driver," Charles corrected, "but the driver I hired for the evening. Why?"

Moira closed her eyes and took a breath. On the exhale, she put the car in gear, her hand tight around the gearshift, and pulled sedately out. The gravel crunched loudly under the tires, and didn't fill the silence so much as augment it. Charles stole a glance at Moira's face, and the rigid control there, her mouth thin and her gaze fixed resolutely forward, wasn't something he could ever remember seeing on her. Passion, irritation, outright anger, stubbornness – all that he knew, and even on the opposite side of ten years he still associated them with Moira Kinross whenever he thought about her, but not anything so cool, or focused, or steely.

She reminded him, he thought, of Erik.

"Do you mind telling me what this is all about? And what you're doing here in the first place?"

Looking back on it, Charles had no idea what he would have expected Moira to say, except that, even though _Your driver is a man, a Russian national known only by the name of Azazel, and he's a known associate of Sebastian Shaw, a man with ties to various international crime syndicates_ was not what he was expecting to hear, it was as good a response as any.

"I have no idea why," Moira said tightly. She shifted down as the front gate dragged open slowly; once they were through and off the gravel, she opened up at the Aston howled down the straight. "I'm pretty sure you're not involved, but I'd say it's a bit more than coincidence that you had a close personal friend of Sebastian Shaw driving you here."

"I'd say that too," Charles admitted. _Erik._ If this – this Azazel knew where he lived, did he know about Erik? And how? "Would you mind terribly taking me home?"

"I haven't got time to drive down to the city," Moira said impatiently.

"Then it's a good thing I'm not in the city; I'm back at the house for the next month."

Moira glanced at him, worrying considering her speed and the narrowness of the road. "I thought you were done with that place, after – I thought you'd settled on England."

"Things change," Charles said, "and would you please drive me home?"

"They do," Moira agreed, "and sure."

* * *

In the two hours Charles had been gone, Erik had managed to pace out the length of the entire first floor. Raven had accompanied him, explaining about the portraits of Xaviers long past, and they had, so far as Erik could tell, been odd individuals even by the admittedly demanding standards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"Now this is Charles's great-great uncle's second cousin, Claudius Xavier," Raven had said as they came to yet another portrait, this one more faded than the others. "He was a herpetologist, and he kept two Galapagos tortoises on the grounds. He was convinced they were communicating with him telepathically."

"Now I know you're making this up." Erik examined the portrait for any resemblance to Charles – it was a strange and infuriating impulse, but he couldn't help it; he looked before he knew he was looking – and decided that the only likeness was in the hair, which was thick and brown and defiantly messy.

"I can show you his notebooks about "Testudinal Telepathy" if you don't believe me. He had an article, too, but his wife managed to intercept it before he could send it to a journal." Raven was clearly used to being disbelieved regarding tales of her adopted family's eccentricities. "Personally, I can't wait for the day I can make Charles sit for _his_ portrait, and I'll tell his kids embarrassing stories, like about the time he burned his eyebrows off with his first chemistry set."

Raven had eventually abandoned him in favor of her writing group, which had (so far as Erik could tell) simply taken over one of the first-floor lounges and appropriated Charles's liquor cabinet.

 _Charles_. In his restlessness – he'd called Charles an hour ago, but Charles hadn't picked up, and he would not, would not, would _not_ think about what that could mean, because Charles had placed his phone on silent for the sake of politeness – he paced his way back to Charles's favorite study. The light, low and gentle as always, failed to soothe him; the chess set and the two companionable chairs reminded him only of what Charles had undertaken because Erik had been stupid and sufficiently blinded by revenge to ask it of him.

He focused on the library instead, the piles and piles of books awaiting someone more organized than Charles to make some sense of them. Then again, Erik supposed, there might be some method to the madness, a method that only Charles could suss out and which made sense only to him, like the piles of paper on his desk and the bizarre notations that covered them and seemed to have no meaning for anyone other than Charles, or maybe Hank.

The books Charles had bought from him – ages ago, years, it felt like – were still stacked awkwardly on a shelf, Moira's old copy of _Ulysses_ and that ridiculous _X-Men_. On a whim, he picked it up, running a finger over the soft, worn back and where the dogears in the cover had almost worn the corners off. It had the musty smell of all old books, and the cheap pulp paper was thick and heavy against his skin, the ink still black and vibrant when he opened to a random page and read.

 _The two men had gathered for their traditional nightcap. When it had become traditional, the tall man had no idea. Could it be a tradition after only two weeks? Not that it would matter anyway: he was hot on the trail of the black-haired man, and as soon as he got word from MacAllister, he'd find the bastard and make him pay for everything he'd taken from Aaron. The former lawyer felt his body tighten as he imagined all the ways he'd make the black-haired man pay, and he was so caught up in imagining it he jumped when he felt Carl's gentle touch on his wrist._

 _Carl always looked at Aaron like he could read his mind. Oh, that's right, the metal-bender thought, he could, because Carl was a telepath._

 _"Do you think revenge will bring you peace, my dear friend?" The hand on Aaron's arm was warm and steady. Compelling. Aaron took a breath to steel himself against it, and the hopeful expression on the telepath's face. "Please, think beyond that for once – think of me."_

Almost viscerally embarrassed for himself and the author (and, strangely, feeling that he'd intruded on a private moment, despite the horrific writing), Erik shut the book and, for good measure, slid it underneath the more formidable bulk of _Ulysses_. Unwillingly, he wondered if Carl had managed to persuade Aaron to abandon whatever plan he had going, or if Aaron would ignore his pleas and continue with his quest to find the black-haired man, whoever he was. He couldn't make up his mind if that would be a good thing or not, and resisted the urge to open the book, skip to the end, and find out for himself.

He distracted himself, thinking of Charles, wishing he had some kind of his own telepathy to reach across the distance and tap Charles on the shoulder. To make sure he's safe, Erik told himself, even though people in general weren't when they were around him. It probably said something about Erik Lehnsherr as a person, that he was willing to put Charles in a position of acute danger if things went wrong where Erik couldn't get to him – let Charles put himself, never mind Charles had a stubborn streak a mile wide and twice as deep, and if he ever met Schmidt and if Schmidt had any sense, Erik thought, he'd be terrified of Charles Xavier. Where Charles hid that steel, Erik had no idea, but it ran deep in him, down into a place Erik strongly suspected he couldn't touch, or anyone else, for that matter.

It made him feel marginally better. Not much, but enough to settle into his usual chair and listen to the distant laughter coming from Raven's writing group. He studied the chess board, the pieces still arrayed in their places from the last, abortive game they'd played. It had ended with Erik on the verge of putting Charles in check, with desperately few options for escape. And instead of doing the honorable thing and resigning or the determined thing and playing in the face of mounting odds, Charles had insinuated himself between Erik's knees and distracted Erik so thoroughly he'd forgotten all his strategy, and whose turn it was, and his world had narrowed down to Charles's hair soft under his fingers and his hot breath and his mouth.

Distantly, he heard footsteps coming up the hallway, moving quickly – two sets, he realized, maybe Charles and Raven haranguing him for the details he hadn't given earlier. He pulled himself back together quickly and checked his watch. Barely three hours, which meant… what, exactly, Erik had no idea. It had either gone well or badly, either Charles had found out something or it had been a wash, and _there's no point getting ahead of yourself, Lehnsherr_.

He listened more closely when the footsteps paused. Voices, Raven's definitely, but thin and strained, _frightened_ where the Raven Erik knew was all brash confidence. The other voice was soft – whispered, doubtless, as if into Raven's ear. More footsteps joined them, a group. The other kids, not a word out of any of them. They'd been silent, Erik realized, for a while now.

"Look," Raven tried to say, "I don't know what this is, but when – "

"Yes, when your dear brother finds out," said a warm, familiar voice. "Let's pray, for his sake, it doesn't come to that, shall we? There's a good girl."

He'd dreamed of that voice for years, _years_ , and the dreams and all the remembered conversations paled against hearing it in the flesh. He was up and out of his chair before he knew it, looking for a weapon, not that there was anything he could use, looking for a way out, not that there was anywhere to go, not with Raven crying now or the other kids probably huddled terrified behind her and he couldn't leave them, not with Raven's tearstained face and her trembling body coming around the corner, hunched in on herself as if to make herself invisible, not with Schmidt standing behind her, an incongruous bottle of wine in one hand, a familiar, benignant smile and terrible eyes.

"Ah, Erik," purred Sebastian Shaw. "It's so lovely to see you again."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to everyone for reading along! There should be about four to five chapters after this one, depending on how a couple things play out... I kind of can't believe that this thing is (almost) over. Over-ish.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter fifteen**

Dropping Charles off involved a stop in town, at the bed and breakfast across the street from the antiques shop. It was, Charles noted, the same bed and breakfast the mysterious, anonymous _friend_ of Erik and his partner had been inhabiting until recently. Moira gave no reason for it, only a glare when Charles followed her in instead of waiting in the car as she'd instructed, and not even a request to turn his back as she shucked off her dress so it lay in a glittering pile at her feet and stepped into clothes he'd recognize her in any day – jeans, dark shirt, practical boots.

The shoulder holster was new, and Charles said as much. Moira yanked a light jacket on over it.

"What's going on?" Charles asked. "I feel, since you're the one with the gun, I have a right to know.

"It's nothing you want to know about," Moira said, "in the 'if I tell you, I'd have to kill you' sort of way."

That Moira was here was strange enough, that she was staying in the same place as the _friend_ who'd been helping out was too much to be coincidence. Charles was no stranger to classified information, but it rankled, because they'd told each other everything once (mostly everything), and he'd known her almost as well as he'd known anyone, and he could tell she was hedging. And he knew the next words out of his mouth were right.

"You're Erik's partner," he said.

Moira caught the _this-is-not-a-question_ tone, looking up from her inspection of her cell phone, but said nothing. Her face said enough, _surprise_ almost shouted across it, and the tensing in her shoulders confirmed it.

"You're working with him," Charles said, and the thinning of Moira's mouth told him he'd struck a nerve, and the rest of the pieces tumbled together. "You're working with him to find Shaw – Schmidt – whatever you call him. That's why you were at the party tonight, to see if you might get some information out of Emma Frost. But you saw him, or he saw you, and you had to get out of there."

Unanswered questions picked at him – he couldn't imagine Moira as a vigilante, or as taking up with someone like Erik (then again, _he_ never thought he'd be the sort of person to take up with someone like Erik), and that still didn't explain the other mysterious friend – but he knew, he _knew_ , he had the heart of it right. Moira was staring at him, utterly gobsmacked, her cell phone forgotten in her hand, and he could almost see her racing to catch up with him and control the damage somehow.

"There are things I can't tell you, Charles," Moira said at last. She pressed a few buttons on the phone, the beeps harsh in the silence. "I can't, for your good as well as mine, and one of those things is, I can't confirm or deny that I work with the person you call Erik."

"'Confirm or deny' is a government thing. At least, it is in every single legal thriller I've ever seen. That," Charles nodded at the now-concealed shoulder holster, "I'm pretty sure this _is_ a government thing."

"Then you'll understand why there are things I can't tell you," Moira snapped. She shook her head, scowled at the phone, and pressed a few more buttons. _Levine_ , she hissed once, impotently, before jamming the disconnect button and saying, "And you should also understand why I'd like to get you home as soon as possible."

Charles _did_ understand it, but flatly refused to like it. He thought of Erik, waiting impatiently at home, and swallowed against the possibilities that presented themselves: Moira arresting him, or just taking him off somewhere, back to the labyrinth of secrets and tragedy and god only knew what else that he'd come from. He watched wordlessly as Moira gathered a few more things – another gun and an ankle holster, which she strapped on, unashamedly competent, and when she caught him looking, she grinned.

"You've worked everything out already, haven't you?" she asked. "You always were unfairly quick."

"Some of the time," Charles said, because he'd been tragically slow on the uptake when it had come to certain things, and offered her a smile. She returned it, slow and regretful, and tried her cell phone again. "What are you doing?"

"I've been trying to get in touch with Levine," Moira said. She shoved the phone in her pocket and turned to an antique chest of drawers. It creaked as she yanked the top drawer open. "I haven't heard from him in days, and he was _supposed_ to come to the dinner with me tonight, but he didn't show." She huffed in exasperation and, after shoving aside a few pairs of socks and underwear, pulled out another cell phone. "Well, this explains it."

"He's the friend," Charles said. Intuition started to gather, an unpleasant prickle at the back of his neck. "He's the one who's been helping Erik out with the – the shop."

"Keeping an eye on him, more like." Moira pressed a few buttons on the phone and began to scroll through its list of recent calls. "Although, knowing Erik, I should have had someone else – ten someone else's – looking after him." She glanced up, a shrewd expression on her face, the one she'd gotten when she'd started to work him out. "But I guess you know something about that, don't you?"

"In a manner of speaking," Charles said, and prayed he wasn't blushing.

Moira hummed. "Before this gets any weirder, I should get you home."

"Right. Just – " his own phone was in his pocket, kept close in case, " – just let me – " He hit the speed-dial for Erik's cell.

No answer, and that – that was not good, not on a night when Erik would have been straining at his own leash, resisting the urge to call Charles for an update.

"You should probably get me home," he agreed.

* * *

"Aren't you going to get that, Erik?" Schmidt watched narrowly as Erik's hand hovered over his jeans pocket. "It's only polite."

Erik fervently wished he had a gun, instead of the damn cell phone. In his pocket, the phone ran down into silence after its six rings. Schmidt smiled indulgently, the _good boy_ smile he wore whenever Erik had pushed back the rage and defiance and complied with orders. He struggled for calm, for something like Charles's endless reserves of tranquility.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, voice level enough to surprise himself.

"You _do_ have a way of complicating things, Erik." Schmidt shook his head and clucked remorsefully. "Contrary as you are, you'd probably take that as a compliment, but I promise you, it's not."

Several years had passed since the last time he'd laid eyes on Schmidt directly, and the sight of him was the sight of something out of a childhood nightmare, utterly unchanged, maybe a few new lines around his eyes to hold the malice, but the superior tilt to the lips, the knowledge in brown eyes that said _I'm above you, so far above I have no fear_ … The rage licked hot at Erik's heart, the heat of it blinding enough that he forgot about reason and took a step forward.

"Ah, ah," Schmidt said. Light ran along the edges of the .45, going liquid around the barrel. "I'd rethink that, Erik, or the young lady gets a lobotomy."

Schmidt stood over Raven, who huddled, tearstained and silent, in the chair Erik usually occupied. The other kids bunched together, herded into a group by a man Erik had never figured on seeing again. Dark eyes regarded him balefully from under the caves of heavy brows, the flesh under them wasted and red.

"Yes, Azazel," Schmidt said, catching the drift of Erik's gaze. "He's a bit annoyed with you about what you did to him. Second-degree burns and a third-degree burn on his left leg, months in the hospital for skin grafts and plastic surgery… Well, I'm sure you can understand why he might entertain some resentment where you're concerned."

"I'd feel bad about that, except for how he helped you kill my family," Erik said flatly. Raven made a soft, surprised noise before she choked it back. "What do you _want_ , Sebastian? Are you planning on killing all of us?"

"It's crossed my mind." Schmidt tipped his head to indicate the semi-automatic cradled in Azazel's arms. "You know I'm not averse to bloodshed, and it'd certainly tie up some loose ends," and those were the kids, _shit shit shit_ , and Erik didn't particularly care about his own life, but Raven dying would kill Charles, and the others – they'd become his responsibility, unlooked-for as it was, "and I wouldn't have to worry about these lovely young people opening their mouths and saying something they shouldn't."

"Do you honestly think you'd get away with this, even if you killed all of us?" Raven demanded. Her voice had gone tight with fear – no, Erik realized, with the anger that came when the mind couldn't take fear any longer. She actually straightened, glaring ferociously up at Schmidt, and good for her, Erik thought. "Do you know who I _am_?"

"The adopted sister of Dr. Charles Francis Xavier, of course," Schmidt said. He gently caressed the side of Raven's face with the .45, the soft red strands of Raven's hair sliding over the barrel. Raven flinched away, but those blue eyes held murder. "I could just kidnap you; I'm sure your brother would pay a fortune to have you back, and you know how crime is… it _does_ pay, and quite well too, but one can always use the money."

Erik could see the _you wouldn't dare_ forming on Raven's lips and willed her not to say it. He must have moved – he did, another abortive step forward, a hand raised in caution – because she bit her lip and bit the words back. Good girl, Erik thought, and spared a glance for the other kids. Darwin had Alex and Angel crowded back against the bookcase; Sean had, for once, lost the haze of his perpetual high, and Hank's eyes were even wider behind his glasses, darting nervously between Azazel's semi and Raven on the chair. He wished, briefly, for telepathy – not that being still would save them, but it would give him time to work something out. Anything.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked. _Time_. Time for what, he had no idea. "Why not just find me and take me?"

"That was the original plan," Schmidt said, "but things change." He ran his fingers through Raven's hair, the hand not holding the gun settling on her shoulder.

"Sloppy work, Sebastian? That's not like you." It wasn't, which meant something – someone – had him worried. "How did you know I was here?"

"Azazel has always been remarkably observant," Schmidt said complacently, but fury glinted in those cool eyes.

Looking at Azazel now, Erik realized he wore a black suit, white shirt, black bow tie – not terribly out of keeping, from what he remembered of Azazel's preferred wardrobe, but cheap, poorly cut, and on the lapel, a logo that had no place on the Azazel Erik recalled. _The driver. Charles's driver._ He hoped, God he hoped (and he never allowed himself to do this, it always ended badly) this meant Charles was safe away.

Or – _He could have Charles._ He refused to think that, that he'd sent Charles into a trap. Anger condensed and cooled into fear, and the last time he'd felt something that acutely cold, that made him helpless and almost a child again, had been the sight of fire engines around his family's house, and the dying flames, and the smoke, a firefighter approaching him with his face lined by smoke and pity, saying –

"Either way," Erik made himself say, "you've got a lot more than you bargained for. These kids are only going to buy you trouble not even _you_ can afford," he nodded at Raven, "so take me – I'll come with you, and you can leave them out of it."

"Max," Raven said quietly, "you _can't_ – "

"I'm the only one you want," Erik continued, ignoring her, and it was strange, addressing Schmidt without the old acid burn of hatred. "I'm always the one you wanted, aren't I?"

"You would never have been happy building bridges or sewer lines in Dusseldorf." Schmidt smiled, the old superior, paternal smile. "When I first met you, I knew that. You have _fire_ in you, Erik. Why waste that, why waste that _passion_ , chaining yourself to a desk and a wife – or, I suppose, your little professor now – like every other insect, when you could be a god instead?"

"Maybe that should have been my choice."

Schmidt _tsk_ 'ed. "Maybe you shouldn't have gone snooping where you shouldn't have. Either way, my boy, I would have had you. You would have thanked me, and I'm truly sorry about your parents, I am… but if it had gone any other way, you would have thanked me."

"I guess we'll never know." The anger came back, a low, golden light in the ashes. _I'll come with you, and I'll kill you this time._ He saw his own death clearly enough. _I'm sorry, Charles._

"Look," he said, once he was certain he could control himself, and that the expression on Raven's face, the murmurs of disbelief and confusion from the other kids, wouldn't kill him. "Look, you've got me, and you always get what you want, so take me. Only let these kids be. I'm off-radar anyway; even if they go running to the police, there won't be anyone to trace. No one will have gone missing." No one except Max Eisenhardt, and he'd died a long time ago.

Schmidt eyed him suspiciously. Erik fought to remain calm, his face empty of everything except resignation. He thought about pointing out that involving Raven further would only involve her brother, and that Charles and his money could complicate things, but sensed that would backfire.

"I'll take you," Schmidt said at last, and Erik did not relax at that. No time to anyway, because Schmidt had his hand on Raven's arm, tugging her up, the gun a reminder at her temple. "And this one… she'll come to keep you in line." The smile was wolfish now, canines glinting. "I know how much you value family, Erik. It's touching, it truly is."

"Leave her out of this."

"You're really not in a position to bargain here," Schmidt snapped. He yanked Raven closer, muzzle of the gun pressing behind her right eye. "I'm not in the habit of asking for favors, Erik, as I believe you know."

 _I express my expectations_. That had been Schmidt during the interview, the morning Erik had decided to turn him down and return to Germany and forget what he'd seen, the morning it had become clear that Schmidt hadn't entertained the idea of Erik (or anyone) ever refusing him.

"Raven," Erik said, as steadily as he could manage, "keep cool. He won't hurt you."

"Your faith is very touching." Schmidt stepped back. "Azazel, if you could please make sure Mr. Lehnsherr follows us? Then… take care of these darling children."

"What?" Raven cried. She jerked against Schmidt's hold, pulling him off-balance.

Erik saw the opening, saw the gun slip from its resting-place against Raven's head. He saw Azazel caught between keeping an eye and the gun on the kids and bringing his aim to bear on Raven, on Erik, and he knew the safety was off, he'd have no time – he was dead, Azazel could get off three shots, maybe four, by the time he tackled Schmidt and gained possession of the gun. He was dead, and Schmidt would get away, Schmidt would win as always, as he was winning now, pulling Raven back tight against him and not losing control of the .45 at all, eyes burning and fearsome, his smile tucked to the curve of Raven's neck.

"That was _not_ bright, little girl," Schmidt breathed. The gun rested under Raven's jaw now, forcing her head up, forcing her up on her toes. "Really, Erik, do you spread obstinance wherever you go?"

" _Don't_ , Shaw," Erik said. His breath didn't want to come, short and shocky. He half-wondered if he'd been shot already. "She's not worth it."

"We're leaving," Schmidt said, taking a step back toward the door. "And this time we're not going to have any hysterics, are we?"

"No, we're not," said a new voice, crisp, familiar, and Erik couldn't decide if it was elation or terror clogging his heart right now.

"We're not," Charles Xavier said, his own weapon trained neatly on Schmidt, "because no one's leaving here at all. At least," Charles added with his usual thoughtfulness, "not until we've got a few things sorted."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to try to post the rest of this over the next few days, and maybe have it wrapped up by Christmas. Happy Holidays!


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter sixteen**

Charles had always been good at working things out on a bare minimum of evidence, or perhaps, he'd always been good at getting as much mileage out of slim evidence as he possibly could. It made him a good scientist, and – usually – good at sussing out people and their motives. The one time it had failed spectacularly had involved Moira, and the fallout had involved a young, heartbroken man's impulsiveness and a series of bad decisions, and a hospital in Germany, with things wounded other than his pride.

His intuition, already mumbling discontentedly about the series of _no-way-are-these-coincidences_ that involved Moira, Erik, Shaw, and the fund-raiser, was now currently insisting that something was deeply, desperately wrong. He had no way to describe it accurately, or at least, no way that didn't sound completely insane, but the air sat wrong, the neighborhood quieter than it ought to be, and most other people would call that paranoia, but Charles knew it was something else.

When Moira moved to get out of the car, he grabbed her by the wrist and shook his head.

"Erik would have answered when I called him," he said, pitching his voice low. He'd persuaded her to park at the edge of the lights in the courtyard, and even that had been straining the edges of her goodwill. "Moira, something's going on."

She glanced up at the house. On any other night it would be _the house_ , massive and wearing its ancient silence the way it always did. From his earliest memories, he couldn't ever remember it changing, the courtyard the same neatly-raked gravel, the fountain, the hedges, the same flowers planted every season. Tonight, the upper levels were dark – not entirely unexpected, with the writing group in residence – but the _voices_ … they were close enough to the lounge Raven and her friends used for Charles to be able to pick out the laughter.

"They'd be drinking by now," he muttered. Moira stared at him in incomprehension. "Moira, I swear to you…"

"I believe you." Moira pulled her service weapon out of its holster. "Which is why you're staying here and calling 911 while I go inside and see what's going on."

"Like hell – I mean, I beg your pardon?" Moira was excellent at taking charge; it was one of the things he'd loved about her. "You've never been here, Moira." She'd never wanted to go, and Charles, who'd been eager to leave some of the more ostentatious signs of his wealth behind, hadn't pressed it.

"And," he added, "you don't know where Erik would be."

She favored him with a level look.

"You can't say I don't have weapons experience," Charles said, "if it comes to that."

"No," Moira said softly, "I don't suppose I could."

She unfastened the .38 from her ankle and handed it to him. It was warm from her skin, light and delicate – dangerous, like Moira was. Her fingers against his were also warm, unexpectedly steady. One of the last times they'd touched, on the night he'd proposed, they'd shaken and then gone still before she pulled them free.

Back in the days of Kurt's dominion, stepping into the house had been like knowingly setting his foot in a bear trap; now, weapon in hand and Moira tense and silent at his back as they crept in through the kitchen entrance, he couldn't escape that creeping, sick anticipation, waiting for the trap to close. All around them the kitchen and first-floor hallways stayed quiet, mostly dark except for a faint light down the western wing.

"The study is down there," Charles whispered, tilting his head to confirm the direction. Moira, bent close, nodded. "There's two ways into it: the door from the hall, and a doorway leading between the study and the blue lounge."

"I can't believe you have color-coordinated lounges," Moira muttered. She pulled out her phone again and, once the other end answered, hissed out a series of incomprehensible instructions. "Special team," she explained, once she hung up. "Orders not to approach the house directly unless otherwise instructed. But they'll stop anyone from getting away."

Charles considered Levine and one's ability to trust other people in general.

"Just so you know, Charles, I have very serious reservations about this."

"My sister and Erik could be in danger," Charles said. "I can't leave them, not when I can do something."

Moira took his free hand in hers and squeezed tight. Charles's heart knocked once, violently, pounding at the wall of his ribs. He squeezed back.

The hallway stretched out, interminably long and filled with alien shadows. Charles paused once, ducking into Kurt's old trophy room – "I need something rather more impressive," he breathed – and, dug his old M9 out from a safe where he kept other things he preferred not to think about. He tried not to think about how easy it was to load it, the familiar weight of it in his hand, and tried to ignore Moira watching, the sadness pulling at the corner of her mouth even as she kept an eye on the door.

Soon enough they were out and moving, the light from Charles's study growing brighter. _Of course Erik would wait here_ , he thought, and wished he could explain this to Moira, that Erik wouldn't have gone to bed, or left, or paced the rest of the mansion like a ghost; he would have gone to where he was comfortable, and there were precious few places Erik found comforting _anywhere_. He caught the edge of voices, the first familiar and sliding over his skin like oil.

" – do you spread obstinance wherever you go?" Shaw asked, the words strained out of shape, nowhere near being the smooth, confident things he remembered.

" _Don't_ , Shaw." Erik now, and Charles almost went light-headed with relief. They were at the corner; peering around it, Charles could see shadows spilling out into the hallway, the now-familiar reddened skin of his driver. Motion, soft noises.

Erik again: "She's not worth it."

A soft noise, liquid with tears, and that was Raven, _that was Raven_ , and Shaw had her. Charles started forward, weapon ready, half-aware of Moira slipping off into the lounge like a ghost, gone quick as a shadow into the darkness. He should have gone, he realized, knowing the room better as he did, but she could work it out.

"We're leaving," Shaw was saying, and his back appeared through the door, the immaculate black of his suit. "And this time we're not going to have any hysterics, are we?"

He didn't check the safety; he knew it was off, and his body knew the business at hand, never mind the ten years between now and the then when he'd last carried a firearm with any idea of using it. Shaw had backed nearly through the door, and there was Raven, her skin pale against the black of Shaw's jacket, and Charles could hear her breaths coming high and tight and desperate, and _no, no, no_.

"No, we're not," he said, when he had the gun's muzzle neatly butted up almost against the back of Shaw's skull.

"We're not, because no one's leaving here at all."

Raven gasped, a breath that might have been his name, or terror, or both. What he could see of her was unharmed, and that was – for a moment the alternative presented itself, and he could, abruptly, understand something of what drove Erik. The others, shepherded into a corner and guarded by Charles's erstwhile driver, stared at him.

Over Shaw's shoulder, beyond Raven's head, stood Erik, whole and beautiful, and that too was fortunate.

"At least," Charles added, "not until we've got a few things sorted."

* * *

"Well," Schmidt purred, "isn't _this_ a surprise, the professor with a set of teeth?"

"You don't strike me as the type very fond of surprises," Charles said levelly, "so in the interests of preventing further ones, tell your man over there to stand down, please."

Schmidt couldn't – didn't dare, Erik saw with vicious satisfaction – turn his head to look directly at Charles, but had to settle for what must have been a blur in his peripheral vision. Under Schmidt's perpetual calm frustration ran, evident in the taut line of his jaw and his grip tightening on Raven's arm. Raven snarled, an order to let go, jerk, and over that, Erik caught the snap of the hammer drawing back. Over the loose collar of his dress shirt, Charles's face was perfectly composed.

"Do what she says," Charles said in the same cool tone with an edge of demand. "Now, please, and you might be able to salvage something from this. Prison time, say, instead of the death penalty – or dying now, which should be your most immediate concern."

"Would you really shoot me, Dr. Xavier? You might be legally justified, but in the eyes of your conscience? Could you really shoot another living being? With your precious _sister_ right here, no less?"

"You talk like I _haven't_ ," and Charles's voice was nothing, _nothing_ like the Charles Erik knew, no kindness or compassion at all, but remote with a superiority Schmidt could envy. He remembered thinking _if Schmidt had any sense, he'd be terrified of Charles Xavier_ , and that was only an hour ago – and maybe, if he'd had any sense, Erik would be terrified too.

" _Now_." The word cracked with command.

"Azazel," Schmidt said, "if you – "

He got no further. Raven tore herself free, and behind him Erik heard a crash, had time enough to register movement and another familiar voice – Moira, pushing him aside and down with one hand and firing with the other.

Schmidt went down, and sprawled out on the floor as he was, Erik saw the red, a sudden splash of it catching Charles across the face. More movement, Azazel, distracted from the kids – who shrank away – raising his own weapon, too slow, too slow, Erik prayed with his heart in his throat, let him be too slow, and he was, because Charles spun and had his firearm leveled squarely at his face, and with Schmidt gasping on the floor, said calmly, "Please drop that, before what happened to him happens to you."

Moira eeled her way through the clutter of furniture, stopping only when she got to Schmidt. Her shoulders shook as she bent over him – collecting the .45, Erik realized, and then, with a burst of anger, saw her press one palm to the wound in Schmidt's chest. She did it with more force than necessary.

"Raven," she said, and how the hell did she know Raven's name, "call 911 for me. I might need to talk to them." Raven stared for a moment but, on Charles's soft _Raven_ , hauled herself to her feet and scurried for the desk and the phone.

Erik picked himself up, quivering with adrenaline and unreality, the knowledge that Schmidt was here, and vulnerable – _finally_ , god, finally – creeping in. His breath shook with it, and if the circumstances were strange and completely unlooked-for, the essentials were there: Schmidt on the floor, floundering with all his control and invulnerability stripped away, and Erik moving to stand over him and to look down at him and see the mortal sweat and the fear. Schmidt's brown eyes, glassy with pain and shock, fixed on him.

"You – " Schmidt started. Moira pressed down harder, her hands two smears of blood; Raven was babbling out directions in the background. Charles had Azazel secured in another armchair with Darwin's help. Schmidt's eyes slid over all of them, returned to Erik again. "I only – "

"You only what?" Erik asked quietly, bending close. Moira shot him a look, clearly warning him not to try anything. He considered Schmidt's throat, making a move for Moira's gun. "You only _what_ , Herr Schmidt?"

"Potential," Schmidt sighed.

"Erik." That was Charles now, tugging him back. He resisted and considered fighting, because it wasn't enough just to watch Schmidt in pain, or maybe even dying, it didn't square accounts, and he looked up at Charles, willing him to understand it. "It won't fix anything," Charles said, broken enough that he didn't sound trite. "Whether now or in prison, he'll suffer, and that'll have to be enough."

"My parents," Erik said, nonsensical.

"You're alive," Charles said firmly, "and that's what they would have wanted, knowing there's more to you than pain and revenge. And that." He nodded at Schmidt, who was breathing shallowly and bleeding out all over the carpet. "This way, you can be free of him."

 _I won't ever be free_ , Erik thought about saying, but the fierce light in Charles's eyes stopped him. Instead, he said, "Thank you, Charles."

Charles didn't say anything, and there didn't seem to be much of a need for words. The medics and what must have been the entire tactical response unit for the five boroughs poured through the study door, whisking Schmidt away to hospital and prison (or, Erik hoped darkly, the morgue), tending to the kids. Charles had gathered Raven close, rocking her as she sobbed and cursed in turns, and ignoring her demands to know what the _hell_ Charles thought he was doing, because "you're a professor, not a big damn hero," she snapped, pulling back to wipe the tears impatiently from her eyes. When Charles tried to hug her again, she slithered away – no use, Erik knew, in appearing too dependent – and went to prop up Hank, who looked to be on the verge of fainting.

It left the two of them alone, while Moira negotiated something with the head officer at the scene. Erik looked and looked for words to say, other than the painfully obvious _I'm so glad you're safe_ and his own _what the hell did you think you were doing?_ but found the silence too much to break. It was too full, with Charles leaning against him, breathing deep and being warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About three more chapters to go. Thank you SO much to everyone who's stuck with this thing so far <3


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter seventeen**

Moira remained the Moira he'd always known: terrifyingly competent and efficient. She had the police and ambulance cleared out, Shaw under heavy guard, and agents apparently teleported in to take statements and secure the house. She paused only once, to take Charles's hand, tell him in a low voice that he was an _idiot_ (but thank you all the same), and to say,

"I need to get to the hospital – I'm not letting Shaw out from under my nose any longer than necessary. There's still Levine…" She trailed off, biting her lip, and that was something else Charles remembered, her rare moments of hesitation. "I don't want to think about the possibility of you being right, but I suppose I'll have to."

"What possibility?" Erik asked, straightening, alert, feline, from his slouch against one of the armchairs.

"We'll discuss it later," Moira said absently, and Charles prayed Erik wouldn't press. By some miracle, he didn't. "In the meantime, I'd suggest locking the house and setting the alarm; I'll have agents standing by, in case, and Erik has my cell number if anything happens."

Ten years or so ago, he wouldn't have been able to take his eyes off her, but ten years had also been, he found now, enough to cool love into something simply warm, softer, something that allowed them to hug and him to let her go with not much more than a smile and good night. He found himself caught instead between Raven and Erik, Raven who was exorcising her fear by bossing the others around, telling them no way, no one was going back to the city tonight – or this morning, with a startled glance at the clock on the mantel – and they _were_ staying here… and Erik, who sat quietly next to Charles, expression distant, and whether he was looking back into the past, or a future without Shaw – or, Charles imagined, trying to plot ways to get at him and finish what Moira's bullet started – Charles couldn't tell.

Raven was hovering at the edge of the space they'd made for themselves, darting anxious glances between them and pushing anxiously at her hair. She seemed all right, not a mark on her except for a fading pink mark where – Charles's heart froze.

"I'm fine," Raven said when she caught him looking, and smiled her old brave smile. Her fingers drifted to the mark, pressing at it. "It was just – just, you know, him trying to scare me." Her voice shook. "I'm sure he wouldn't – he wasn't _actually_ …"

Charles swallowed back everything he wanted to say, which was too much and not enough, way too much fear that he'd pushed down to get through the evening, and he'd have to handle that eventually, but not here. Not in front of Raven, who was pushing impatiently at her own tears. Distantly, he felt the caress of Erik's thumb – strong, callused, achingly familiar – across the back of his hand.

"Everyone should get to bed," Erik said quietly. At least someone was managing to be authoritative here. "Raven, do you think you can get everyone settled?"

"Yeah." Raven coughed, then nodded. "Yeah."

"We should do the same ourselves." Erik hooked his arm around Charles's back, urging him to stand. His legs didn't want to cooperate, and for a moment he was _back then_ , holding onto the bars for dear life as his legs gave out underneath him and his back rippled with agony because his muscles had turned to water and it wasn't – _no, you're fine, you're fine_ , he told himself, and managed to straighten up. The thought of hiking up a flight of stairs and down the hall to his room seemed, suddenly, like climbing Everest.

At least Erik was there, warm and _alive_ , chivvying Charles along with impatient grumbles and threats concerning what would happen if Charles took too long in the shower.

"You could always join me," Charles said. The innuendo fell a little flat, but Erik smiled his thin, sad smile anyway.

They persuaded Raven and the others to bed, all of them sufficiently frightened to bunk two or more to a room – Raven and Angel (Raven only going into her room after clinging to Charles tightly enough to crack ribs), Hank and Sean, Alex and Darwin.

"That was pretty kick-ass, Prof," Darwin said over his shoulder. He hesitated, as if about to say more, but then settled on "g'night" and slipped into the guest room. Alex said something indistinct that involved a few curse words, Darwin replied with "chill, man," and the door closed behind him.

"It was pretty kick-ass," Erik agreed, nosing softly at Charles's hair. "When I saw you – "

"I don't want to think about it," Charles muttered. It was cruel and ironic, because that was all he _could_ think about, the gun – gone as it was into an evidence bag – still a tangible weight pulling his hand down, the adrenaline ghosting through him, and _Raven with Shaw's gun at her temple and his arm clasped tight around her_ , and the other kids crowded into a corner and terrified, and Erik furious and utterly helpless. The breath he managed didn't quite want to fill his lungs, and the second one wasn't much better.

"Let me," Erik said gruffly, and "Let you what?" Charles asked as Erik ducked into the bathroom. The water turned on, ran a moment, then turned off, and Erik reemerged holding a damp washcloth. He ran this over the crest of Charles's temple, down to his jaw, his cheek, his neck, and in the dim light from the bathroom Charles saw the faint smudges there that, in fuller light, would translate from gray to red.

He pointedly didn't look at his shirt as Erik undid the buttons and pulled it off him, and said nothing when Erik frowned at it, something terrible chasing across his face, and crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. Dried sweat stuck uncomfortably between his shoulder blades and he thought a shower might be nice as he fumbled with the button of his trousers and gave up in favor of letting Erik take care of it. He shuffled out of his shoes and socks, and then the trousers as they pooled around his feet, and the thought of a shower, with the weight of the day – and the fear, and the gun – pulling at him was too much.

Erik didn't bother him about it, for which he was grateful, and instead stripped out of his own clothes and crawled into bed with Charles. The entire room seemed transformed by him, every time he entered it. Charles was prepared to call this insane, or obsessive, and if Raven knew about it she'd lecture the hell out of him, but Erik _belonged_ , as permanent as anything in Charles's life, more so, for that matter.

He saw, with vicious clarity, the gun in Shaw's hand, and Erik standing maybe ten feet away, and Raven a blur of red and tears. Ten feet away, too far to do anything except try to save Raven's life and pay the price for it, and _how close_ had it been, Charles wondered, if he'd been a few minutes later, or if he hadn't pressured Moira into letting him help, if he hadn't, if he hadn't –

Fear ran through him, a tectonic shiver of it, and Erik held on, and held on.

* * *

"Jesus," Charles muttered. "God, Erik, Raven, you could have…"

"I didn't." Charles managed one huge, hitching breath in reply; the exhale was tremulous. Erik, the sight of Charles whipping around that corner clear in his mind's eye, added, "You came in time."

"I know," Charles said fiercely. "I _know_."

 _Alles ist gut_ , Erik whispered, mostly into Charles's hair. Charles calmed a bit, the shivering finer now, smoothing out into occasional shudders that eventually stopped. The tension in Charles's body said he wasn't asleep, and maybe was nowhere near being so, despite his own exhaustion. For himself, Erik felt himself pushed past that point, as though he'd passed through it and out the other side into a wakefulness that felt like it might last forever even as all he wanted to do was sleep.

He searched for a word that might fit, anything to describe something so bone-deep and _everywhere_ , every cell of his body emptied out and waiting to be filled again. After Schmidt – who was still alive, but no longer the monster he'd been – he'd thought he'd feel different, _free_ , or powerful, and suddenly that seemed as foolish as expecting his parents to come back. Erik had to close his eyes at that thought, that it was over, or as over as it would ever be, and maybe that explained it, why he didn't feel free so much as _exhausted_ , the force that had driven him through the past eight years completely spent, like it'd bled out of him and left him insubstantial.

Charles shifting against him was, very nearly, the only real thing in the world; he felt like a shell, ready to shatter at the slightest pressure, but Charles was solid and unthreatening, and settling comfortably along his side, something to hold onto. Erik did, and not long ago he would have been embarrassed at how tightly he wanted to hold on, but that didn't seem to matter much now.

"You're okay?" he asked Charles. His voice sounded strange to his own ears.

"Yes," Charles said, still shaky from earlier. He had his head resting on Erik's chest, toes a tentative weight against his calf. "Well, better, at any rate." His hair brushed Erik's arm softly as he looked up. "What about you? Or is that a bad question?"

"I don't know," Erik said, honestly. He laced one arm around Charles's shoulder to pull him close and Charles came, beautiful and fluid and firm. Absently, Erik plotted out the span of his shoulders, wandered the dovetail of his shoulder blades to his spine and stepping down vertebra by vertebra to the old scar.

"How did you get this?" he asked, and then remembered Charles's words, _war wound_ , and the pistol, an M9, the standard service pistol for the –

"I was in the Army." Charles laughed softly, clearly anticipating the disbelief and the question. "I entered it because I had graduated from university early and been dumped by my girlfriend, to whom I'd just proposed marriage, and, like the rest of the country I suppose, I was feeling young and stupid and self-destructive… Hardly the best reasons to go to war, are they?" He didn't wait for Erik's agreement. "I got this," he shifted so Erik's fingers ran across the whorl where someone had stitched skin and muscle back together, "a couple months into my first – and, as it turned out, only – tour, when I was trying to pull someone from a collapsed building. A, ah, support beam fell on us, and my back took the worst of the impact. The scar is from the surgery."

Erik tried not to obsess at the scar, but his fingers persisted in wandering back to it, the faint ridges that ran down into smoother skin and obscured the pliant shift of Charles's body underneath. "Does it hurt?"

"Not the scar… My back does on occasion." Charles shifted again, sighing as Erik's palm settled low on the curve of his spine, the width of it splayed across the warm stretch of Charles's flank. "I was – I was in therapy for over a year, in a wheelchair for a good part of that. I didn't adjust very well, but you know, I keep thinking – now that I'm able to walk again – I would have eventually. Adjusted, I mean." Charles paused. "That's probably one of the larger lies I tell myself. And it's why I went back to school when I did… Better to think about genetics again and do work than wallow. Raven helped."

That explained the overprotectiveness, and Raven's near-paranoiac levels of distrust when it came to her brother becoming interested in someone. _Falling in love_ , Erik thought, and then abruptly, _Moira_.

"She blames herself, even though I've told her not to," Charles said, quieter now. He traced out meditative patterns on Erik's chest, dipping into the space between his collar bones. "It wasn't long after we had a pretty colossal falling-out, and… and we decided it would probably be best if we kept our distance. Still, she was the first person I saw when I woke up in Germany."

Charles sighed. "And that's the Saga of Charles Xavier. Fascinating bedtime reading material, isn't it?"

His face was still warm, flushed under Erik's hand, a bit damp as if he'd been crying silently. Erik kissed him, helpless to do anything else, and Charles made a soft, broken noise that vibrated against Erik's mouth. He licked carefully at Charles's lips and sighed when he felt them part, the kiss going nowhere in particular except maybe deeper and with Charles sliding up tight to Erik, one hand cradling Erik's face to steady him and keep him there.

Charles broke the kiss to breathe and to settle back into him again, gazing up at him intently. In the dark of the room, his eyes were dark pools, nothing much vibrant about them, gleaming a little where the light landed. Erik imagined those same eyes, fixed, determined, and Charles absolutely unflinching – not only from the horror of his sister with a gun to her forehead, or the man he loved trapped (and Charles loved him, Erik realized with a distant and disbelieving sort of wonder) – and how he'd lived in the years before Charles had wandered into his stupid antiques store, and how he ever thought he'd go on afterward, Erik had no idea.

"Don't leave," Erik said, the words startled out of him.

"I could make the same request of you."

And there _were_ ways Erik could leave him. The future stretched out, dozens of possible paths to it: prison for what he'd done during his time with Schmidt, Moira hiding him away again until the trial if Schmidt survived the night, Erik _choosing_ to leave because even Charles's money might not shield him from the sorts of people in Schmidt's circle, even though half the underworld had to be rejoicing that Schmidt had been taken down…

"I won't let you," Charles told him. "I'll have Raven tie you up. There are basements here, you know. Sub-sub-sub basements, thanks to my insane stepfather."

There were promises Erik couldn't make, and shouldn't, but he made them anyway, not with words so much as gathering Charles back to him and allowing his weight, the solidity of him, to press the two of them deep into the mattress.

"You know," Charles said when Erik let him up for air, tone accusing and eyes glinting, "you still haven't looked at those paintings yet."

"Then I should probably stay," Erik said, "until I do."


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter eighteen**

Charles, for a wonder, woke up before Erik – woke up without _waking_ Erik, who'd been hair-trigger whenever Charles had so much as twitched the precious few times they'd slept together. Now, though, the thin dawnlight skated over his back, no tension in his spine at all, and what Charles could see of his face was curiously loose, peaceful, and something Charles backed away from disturbing.

Instead, he got up and stepped into his pajama pants and robe, tossing cautious glances at Erik sprawled boneless under the covers. When Erik didn't move, Charles thought _just as well_ , and slipped out the door and down the hall.

The house, even settled as it was, felt strange against his bones and the awareness of what had happened here last night. He felt, distantly, the sleeping presences of Raven and her friends, not feeling so much as a peculiarly acute _knowing_ that people occupied rooms that hadn't had guests since the days his mother had entertained, or the one time that strange superhero movie had filmed on the estate and needed some of the rooms. (That had been his father's idea, over his mother's protests, and Charles had been deeply thrilled as only a seven-year-old boy could be.) He felt more than saw the agents on the first floor, a door ajar here and there, a faint voice giving a status update.

Moira sat in the kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee and, from the crease in her forehead, one of her headaches. She looked up as he walked in.

"I brought my own," she said, raising her cup. Paper, from some take-out place in town, and Charles sniffed.

"You could have helped yourself," he said. "Can I make you some now?"

"Oh, you know me… I never say no to coffee." Moira set her cup down. Charles turned away to root through the refrigerator.

The routine of prepping the coffee maker and watching it burble its way through brewing comforted him, something familiar in the unreality of having his erstwhile girlfriend (and erstwhile love of his life, and the first object lesson when it came to moderating his desires) sitting in his kitchen the morning after shooting a man who'd been about to kidnap his sister and possibly murder his current – his current – whatever Erik was. From her perch at the table, Moira took a deep, appreciative breath and seemed to relax, and that relaxed him in turn.

"I used to think you'd develop a tolerance," Charles said as he poured a mug, "and we'd have to start giving you IVs. You nearly drank me out of the apartment finals your junior year."

Moira hummed. "I'm pretty close to that," she said, and accepted the mug from him, along with a spoon for the sugar.

Handing the coffee over felt like handing over something more significant. Moira seemed to sense that; the humor slid off her face, and where the light of it had been seriousness crept in. When she smiled around the rim of the mug, it was sad.

"I heard what happened to you, in Afghanistan," she said quietly. Despite the dark smudges under her eyes, the wrinkles in her jacket, she was steady when she looked at him, somber. Her long, delicate fingers cradled her coffee cup. "Charles… I'm so sorry. _So_ sorry."

"I was stupid," Charles said. He stared fixedly at his own mug as he filled it. "And that was my fault; you have nothing to apologize for. And," he added, possibly feeling a bit more mean-spirited than he wanted to admit, "you never believed in taking responsibility for things that weren't your responsibility in the first place."

"But if I hadn't turned you down – "

"We probably would have been miserable after a while," Charles interrupted. "You were right, you know. We were too young, and I… well, I was stupid." And, he'd realized with maturity and the year he'd had to reflect on his foolishness, she would have resented him and the way romantic notions tended to chain ambition no matter how much Charles had thought they wouldn't.

"You say that a lot," Moira said, "but it's really not true. And I should have explained myself better. At least, that way you wouldn't have been so upset, and Raven wouldn't have put a price on my head when she found out."

Charles slid into his own seat, suddenly and unaccountably exhausted, and filled with the desire to crawl right back into bed with Erik. Across from him, Moira rubbed a hand over her face as if to erase her own exhaustion. She remained pale as ever, her hair disheveled and pulled haphazardly back into the clip she'd worn last night and what felt like ages ago. They were both, Charles reflected, much older now.

"What happened to political science?" he asked, to say anything that didn't have to do with his disastrous proposal of marriage and her refusal. "I was contacted by the CIA, you know. I thought maybe you were fomenting rebellion somewhere."

"The CIA happened." Moira swallowed a mouthful of coffee and winced. The look she offered him was unexpectedly humorous. "In the way that they wanted me to work with them. I've been with them ever since I graduated."

"And you're happy," Charles said, not quite daring to make it a question.

"I am." Moira made an equivocating gesture, but he sensed the truth behind the statement anyway.

"Then that's all that matters, isn't it?"

"I suppose so." Moira's toe tapped his ankle gently. "I'm not so egotistical as to believe that I ruined everyone for you, you know. I hope you're happy. That you've been happy." She tilted her chin upward and shot a questioning look at him.

"None of your business, Kinross," Charles said frostily.

"MacTaggert now, actually," Moira said, and at Charles's startled look, added, "I took my mother's maiden name when I joined the agency. It… made things easier. Made the break easier, with old things. People." _You_. the wry twist of Moira's mouth said. "But…" she bit her lip, "I hope we can be friends. Or friendly at least."

"I think we can." Charles offered her his best smile, and to his relief, she returned it.

"That'll make this next little while easier." At Charles's frown, she said, "I'm going to need to stay in touch with you, Raven, and the others. Shaw _is_ going to be charged, at least with attempted kidnapping and assault. The federal government may bring its own charges, depending what my own investigation turns up – depending on if I can get Erik to testify." She sighed. "It may be easier to move a damn mountain… Erik isn't really a believer in the justice system."

"You can't blame him." And, Charles realized, he couldn't. "But I… I could talk to him, if you want."

"You have more to offer than I do," Moira said dryly. Charles blushed, and she laughed. "Well, it's true. But," sobering now, "the investigation will have its own problems. Levine _was_ working for Shaw; it was Shaw he'd been talking to, the day you visited. I was able to get a trace on some of the numbers from the shop's phone log. He'd been under orders to tell Shaw if anyone who wasn't myself or Levine was in contact with Erik; either Shaw was planning to use that person – you – as leverage against Erik, or else he worried Erik was planning something. He's not saying much about it at the moment."

"Still drugged?" Charles asked, half-wishing Shaw was too busy screaming in agony to say anything coherent. He didn't know what terrified him more, that Shaw had had an eye on him – which he had; the driver had been one of his associates, one of the ones Erik had thought was dead – or that he'd almost been the means by which Erik would have found himself trapped in Shaw's designs again.

"In surgery; I'm waiting for the phone call. But," Moira continued, "if I can get the government a case solid enough to warrant federal charges involving Shaw's international criminal activities, I _will_ need Erik to testify, on the nature of the operation Shaw ran and some of the things they're responsible for. I know you, at least, believe in the system. You know it works. Slowly, but it does."

"Not for everyone, though," Charles said, thinking of a house fire and a terrified, angry young man who had nowhere to turn. "And I'll talk to him, but I can't – I can't _coerce_ him, Moira. He's had enough of that in his life."

"You don't need to worry about it," Erik's voice said from the doorway. "I'll cooperate, but the deal's changed."

Charles's head snapped up at the words. Erik stood there, hands tight at his sides, all that tension bled back in like it had never left. He had eyes only for Moira and those were defiant, fierce despite his disordered hair and yesterday's clothes, the sleep lines still heavy around his mouth. The brief glance he spared for Charles was filled with regret, and Charles's heart twisted.

"Erik," he tried.

"I'll testify," Erik reiterated, ignoring Charles and focused utterly on Moira, "but I want your guaran – no, your _promise_ that nothing will happen to Charles, Raven, or any of the other kids."

"They'll have to testify – "

" _Nothing_ , Moira." Erik loomed over her now, so far from being the Erik Charles knew that Charles couldn't reconcile how two men might share the same body. He tried to say something, _don't do this_ or _I don't need you bloody sacrificing yourself or whatever it is you think you're doing_ , but Erik gestured harshly for his silence and said, "Swear to me."

"You know I can't promise that," Moira said. Even though she had her head craned back so she could meet him eye to eye, she didn't seem in the least cowed. Wary and regretful, but not afraid. "But you have my word. They'll be as safe as I can make them. And if they do have to testify, I'll talk to the attorney, try to keep their exposure to a minimum."

Some of the tautness leached from Erik's shoulders and he nodded. "When do we leave?"

" _Erik_ , for god's sake," Charles snapped, because _no_ , no this wasn't happening, not after last night and not after Erik only had a few hours' peace.

"Not for a bit," Moira said, so neutral Charles knew she'd caught on to what Charles wasn't saying and what Erik wasn't giving him the chance to ask for. "I was going to wait until I heard more about Shaw's condition, then head down. When I go back to the hospital, I'll take you with me, and we'll see about putting you into protective custody until you can talk to the prosecutors."

"Okay," Erik said calmly.

No, _no_ that was not okay, and Charles had opened his mouth to say as much, had gotten out a despairing noise that finally pulled Erik's attention to him when Moira's cell phone rang.

"MacTaggert," she said crisply, and Charles thought, idiotically, of the name scrawled inside the cover of the copy of _Ulysses_ from Erik's shop. Moira's forehead furrowed as she listened, her eyebrows jumping up briefly before narrowing again. Her mouth went soft, her eyes wide. "I – I see. When did the doctors – five minutes ago? I'll be right down."

The phone beeped as she disconnected the call. Difference had settled over her, her face somewhere between shocked and considering, and she was quite frozen in place. Charles could almost see the past minute playing over in her mind, her plans adjusting themselves in response to whatever she had learned.

"That was one of my agents," Moira said. She set the phone down on the table, an excess of care. "Shaw – "

* * *

The night before, after the government had carted Schmidt off to the hospital and he'd been too overcome with relief to do more than register Charles whole and safe under his hands, he'd allowed himself the first fantasies in years that hadn't had to do with Schmidt dying and Erik setting himself free. They'd involved completely improbable visions of Charles and some distant, fuzzy future shaped of no specifics, only contentment and being together, but they were no less potent for all of that. He'd drifted off to them, in the end, with Charles's back molded along his front and breathing in Charles's scent where it had concentrated in the curve of his neck and shoulder.

Now, _now_ though, one minute he'd been facing the dissolution of those dreams, short-lived as they'd been, but they'd taken root and become permanent in the way that his family had been permanent before Schmidt had taken them from him. He'd resigned himself to that, and to maybe seeing Charles once more at Schmidt's trial and then never again – but at least Charles would be safe, even if he'd be in prison or vanished again to one of Moira's nowheres, and he'd told himself if he could get past his parents' deaths, he could get past this.

(Of course, even as he'd told himself that, he'd known it was a _gigantic_ lie, because he carried that images of his ruined house with him every day, the embers of it fueling his rage. What purpose he might find for losing Charles, though, he had no idea. Erik had never made a habit of regretting anything he'd done, but Charles… he'd regret leaving him, no matter the reason for him leaving in the first place.)

One minute had been the end of whatever tentative future it was he'd started to imagine, and the next had been _the end_ , Schmidt gone, and Erik hadn't even seen it.

He'd seen the _beginning_ , Schmidt's blood soaking into the carpet – if he broke into that room, he could probably see the dried remnants of it – but his entire life had led up to that delicious, perfect moment when he could see the life fading from Schmidt's eyes and know that the last thing on Schmidt's mind would be Erik's victory. That moment had played itself out in dozens of permutations, different weapons, different circumstances, but always Schmidt at his feet and Erik had always seen that moment of Schmidt's dying _so clearly_. Having Schmidt die by another's hand – by _Moira's_ , no less – while he watched, defenseless and utterly helpless had never once occurred to him as a possibility.

Fury turned over like a sleeping beast. He wanted to wake it up and be properly angry, because it seemed he should be. He couldn't work out where to direct the anger. Charles – he could be angry at Charles for putting himself in danger like an idiot, for (this was paranoid, even for him, Erik had to admit) conspiring to rob Erik of his vengeance and save Erik from himself. The kids, for being stupid enough to wander right into the clutches of a man with a gun – this was ridiculous, and part of Erik knew it was useless and unproductive but he couldn't care – or Moira, who'd known better than anyone else except Charles what Schmidt dying meant to him, and had taken that shot anyway.

He shut his eyes. The anger crawled at the back of his throat, bitter and metallic. Barely a day ago he would know what to do with the anger, channel it into tracking Schmidt down or getting through the fiction of the life he'd put together so that he _could_ track Schmidt down eventually. But Schmidt was gone, gone, _gone_ , and the anger couldn't go anywhere anymore.

Erik couldn't either, for that matter. Moira had, some indeterminate amount of time ago, left for the hospital, and left with orders that Erik was to stay at the mansion where someone could keep an eye on him. He'd ended up leaving the kitchen before Moira and Charles could say anything, not entirely trusting himself to say something he would eventually regret, and he'd holed up in Charles's study, of all places, already familiar, and had been scowling at the chess board for however long. Charles hadn't come by once, prudently giving him his space.

That would only last so long, though. The sun had wandered across the sky, its light bolder now at early afternoon. It was beautiful out, Erik thought distantly, and wondered if he was under house arrest or if he could go out into the yard and move. He'd half-formed a resolution to get up and sneak outside when a soft knock – Charles's, unobtrusive but still demanding to be noticed – sounded on the door. A moment later, his disheveled head peeked through.

"Are you all right?" he asked, mouth twisting ruefully even as he said the words. "Well, I know you're not, but did you need anything?"

"I don't know," Erik said.

Charles took this as an invitation to come in, moving cautiously, all his attention on Erik. He slid onto the other end of the couch, a respectful distance diminished by the intensity of his gaze. He'd dressed at some point, in nondescript jeans and t-shirt, his hands – Erik thought of them holding a gun, absolutely steady – loose in his lap, all very young and innocent when he was rather quite the opposite.

"I suppose," Erik said, spurred on by a bit of meanness looking at Charles's guileless face, "you're happy that I don't have blood on my hands."

"For your sake, even if you can't see it. But," Charles paused for a breath, "mostly I'm happy you're alive."

"Is it bad," Erik asked, "that I can't be?"

His name was little more than a breath on Charles's lips.

"I've wanted him dead for so long," Erik explained. The words were nowhere near as eloquent coming out of his mouth as he'd heard them in his head. "What the hell do I do now?"

"Living well is the best revenge, they say," Charles said, and then with a wince, "I'm sorry, that was flip. But you _are_ alive, Erik, and you don't have to fear Shaw anymore. From where I stand, those are good things."

"I didn't fear him," Erik growled, "I fucking _hated_ him. I wanted him dead, Charles, _and I wanted to be the one to kill him_. I didn't want your help, or Moira's, I never needed it – "

"You needed help last night," Charles said quietly but still impatiently, "and there's no shame in that. And," he paused to slide closer, into Erik's resistant arms and with his own arms wrapped tight around Erik's shoulders, "you, god, you kept Raven and the others alive. You were going to _give yourself up_ to save them." His fingers dug into the pad of muscle over Erik's shoulder blades. "You were – god, you've always been alone, Erik, but you _weren't_ last night."

Erik stubbornly kept his arms by his side, fingers just touching the run of Charles's thigh. "You like saying that a lot," he grumbled.

"I say it because it's true." Charles drew back a little and fixed him with a look. "And like I promised you last night, I'm not going _anywhere"_

"Bloody impossible," Erik grumbled, but let himself touch Charles more freely, his chin hooking over Charles's shoulder.

"I've been told that so many times," Charles said airily even as he clutched Erik close and situated himself more firmly on Erik's thighs. He was unexpectedly heavy, solid. _Real._ "Just… let me help you, _please_. However I can, you don't need to be afraid to ask for it."

"I'll try," Erik said, which was, in the light of day, the best promise he could give.


	19. Chapter 19/epilogue

**Chapter nineteen/epilogue**

 _Four months later_

With the coming of early fall Salem emptied out, as the tourists trudged back to their everyday lives and the posh country homes were given over to their caretakers. Labor Day was like throwing a switch or a circuit breaker, one last surge over the weekend as people tried to cram in a few more hours of fun before the real world came back, and then the collapse into trooping to the station for the morning commute and not much traffic beyond people going about their business. Best of all, as far as Erik was concerned, he didn't have to wait in line for an hour to get coffee or lunch, and he had fewer customers to endure.

"If I had to put up with one more day of the soul-destroying inanity that is the average tourist, I'd have shot myself," Erik grunted as he pushed another box onto the waiting dolly. "And you know, I've never been able to figure out how in the _hell_ people can actually buy this shit."

"Mysteries of the human race," Moira said. She smiled, an expression Erik still wasn't entirely used to. It made her look almost pleasant and unthreatening, but he knew better by now. "Are you sad to see this place go?"

She gestured to _this place_ , the walls stripped of everything except their paint and a few stubborn nails, the telephone wire amputated of its telephone. The moving truck, stuffed with boxes of crap not even bored tourists were stupid enough to buy, idled behind the shop, rumbling away as it waited. The door leading to Erik's old upstairs flat gaped, and beyond it and up the stairs the flat was also empty, except for an air freshener. Already, the space had the peculiar feel of being _empty_ , waiting to be filled again, and he couldn't help looking around it, remembering things as they'd been until the end of business yesterday, when he'd turned the _Closed, Go Away_ sign to face outward for the last time.

"Well?" Moira's lips quirked. "Don't tell me you're getting sentimental, Lehnsherr."

"In your dreams." Erik scowled and thrust the roll of packing tape at her. "Make yourself useful and tape up that box."

"Whatever you say." Moira waved the tape vaguely at him. "I bet you'll miss it. In fact… you miss it already."

"Like I'll miss you when you finally find someone else to torment." Erik shoved another box onto the dolly with more force than was strictly necessary. The cardboard box protested at its treatment, tearing at the corners, but held.

"So you _will_ miss me."

"Only compared to missing an STI."

"She's just taking the piss, Erik." Charles's boots were loud on the bare floors, his voice echoing against the ceiling. Erik opened his mouth to tell Charles he _knew_ this, he wasn't an idiot, but Charles blithely ignored him, looking at the boxes on the dolly and the one remaining on the counter. "Is that it?"

"I honestly have no idea how I managed to acquire more than I managed to sell. Surely there has to be at least a thousand boxes in that damned truck." Erik rolled his shoulders and stretched out a day's worth of work, as much for the appreciative glint in Charles's eyes as the pleasure of working out the ache building in his muscles. "It's not right."

"Hmmm," Charles said distractedly.

"Oh, for god's sake." Moira yanked at the tape until it cut, and plastered the box shut. "At least wait until I'm out of here before being disgusting and romantic."

"Of course," Charles said. The smile he offered her was one of his real ones, that drew lines around his eyes and made them, ludicrously, brighter. Erik squelched the small flicker of jealousy and the impulse to remind Moira that she'd had her shot. "Thank you so much for all your help, Moira."

Erik had the feeling that he meant far more than helping Erik pack up and close the shop.

"Well," Moira said, "I haven't actually had a vacation in three years, since this one needed babysitting all the time," which was a complete _lie_ and Erik reminded Moira of this, "so I figured, why not spend it helping my ex-boyfriend and his _new_ boyfriend close up the antiques shop I arranged mostly so I could watch the new boyfriend squirm while he sold porcelain cows to little old ladies?"

"The disturbing thing is, this is probably fun for you." Erik collected the box from the counter and stowed it on top of the others. "If that's all, Agent MacTaggert…?"

"It is for now." Moira leaned back against the cash desk and studied them thoughtfully.

"Erik," she said after a moment, "I'm sorry about Schmidt. And everything else."

It was the first time she'd alluded to that night since the investigation had finished. Outside of the courtroom in Azazel's trial, she hadn't mentioned it, not once, and whether that had been tact or self-preservation, or maybe Moira knowing what Schmidt's death meant to him, Erik couldn't quite work out. Logic understood that, in the end, Moira would have a much easier time living with Schmidt's dying than Erik, who would have faced consequences one way or another, no matter how much fantasy had told him that the story ending with him, Schmidt, and a gun would have freed him from eight years of hell.

It meant that Frost and the others could hide, under the protection of a senator who had enough of a vested interest, and enough power, to back-burner any investigation. Schmidt was dead and the attempted kidnapping trial had shifted responsibility almost wholly onto Azazel's shoulders; Schmidt himself became a footnote, a ghost fading around the edges of the story.

 _So you see, sometimes neither justice nor vengeance work out the way we think they will_ , Charles had said philosophically when his lawyer called him with the verdict. _It's not going to be perfect, but the best we can do, sometimes, is go on living, however we can._

Which, Erik figured, was what he was going to do. He gestured impatiently for Charles to go start the truck, submitted to a hug and a threatened visit from Moira, and, rocking the dolly back onto its wheels, pushed the last boxes out the door, which he locked behind him.

* * *

 _Two weeks after that_

Charles had been raised to believe that living life in the limelight was an exceptionally tawdry pursuit, fit only for the children of the _nouveaux riches_ , who were, his mother said, people with more money than taste, or royalty whose common sense had been bred out of them and replaced with undesirable hereditary conditions. That, and his predilection for retirement and study (and his having the foresight to have his drunken college rebellion in Boston instead of New York or L.A.), meant that he'd managed to stay safely out of tabloids and gossip columns that slaughtered acres of trees in the name of chronicling the exploits of some heiress or other. Even though he'd disappointed his mother in many other particulars – hating Kurt just as much at his eighteenth birthday as he did on his tenth, studying genetics instead of business, going into the _Army_ , heaven forfend – at least he hadn't disappointed her in that.

"In fact," he'd said to Erik one night, "I think I might have dodged another unfortunate Xavier tendency."

"Drunken college rebellion?" Erik had asked, rolling him over onto his stomach and nosing thoughtfully behind his ear. "You'll have to tell me more about that."

Not even a hundred years ago the Xaviers had been depressingly adept at commandeering the headlines of the society pages, usually for being bizarre or drunk in a public place. Ma-mère had used the copious bustle and train of her dress to smuggle her favorite cats into her box at the Metropolitan; she would have gone undetected had not one of them started yowling during "Quando m'en vo' soletta" in _La Bohème_ and actually leaped off the balcony trying to get at the soprano. In his younger days, Great- _grandpère_ Xavier (he of the rated-X collection) had taken up with women other than his wife – which was fortunate, the _Planet Daily_ had insinuated gleefully, as Josephine Xavier had preferred her husband's bed partners as well. Then there was that one uncle of his who had only emerged from his estate to tell fortunes in the city, and the distant, ancestral cousin who claimed he could read minds and had started some kind of cult during the American mania for hypnotism and mysticism in the mid-nineteenth century.

This was one family predilection Charles was quite happy to avoid, and so it was distinctly uncomfortable to find himself the subject of Raven's writing group's most recent interest.

"Don't you have actual work you need to be doing?" Charles asked. They ignored him, of course. From his perch behind Raven's chair, Hank grimaced apologetically.

"I can't believe we were all right," Angel said for the tenth time, sounding as disbelieving as she'd been when she said it for the first. She also sounded rather hyper; at this time of day on a Saturday, they were fueled primarily by adrenaline and Charles's espresso machine. "I mean, tragic past? On the run from the Mob? So completely implausible you couldn't actually make it up? Everyone was right except Alex, since Erik never actually went to prison."

"It was a legitimate assumption," Alex protested. "I mean, you all saw him."

Charles prudently ignored the group's continued fascination with the Saga of Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier, which had become some kind of bizarre, fictionalized collaborative project. When he pointed this out, Raven blithely ignored the essential weirdness of a writing exercise that required each group member (except Darwin, who'd struck Charles as a clear-sighted young man until Darwin revealed he was going to "synthesize the narrative strands") to write some sort of permutation of the basic story, which would then be stitched together with the others into some kind of experimental structure that Charles failed to comprehend, having tuned them out once Raven started rambling about Brechtian theater and nonlinear narrative.

"By the end of it," she concluded, "we'll make the _im_ probable seem not only _probable_ , but _inevitable_." She sighed, sounding suspiciously sloppy. "It's like all great love stories, really. You think they'll never happen, but somehow, they do." After a pause, she added, "Obviously it's nowhere near as simple as that. We're not writing a damn romantic comedy."

Angel cooed her agreement.

"I still can't believe you don't have work you should be doing," he muttered now, and to Hank (who was now sitting next to Raven, pointedly not touching), he said, "and I _know_ you have work; that review's not going to write itself."

"In a bit," Hank said, looking far more enthralled with Raven than concerned for the state of his assistantship.

"Carry on then," Charles said, and made his escape.

* * *

Erik walked by the old shop two blocks down the main street, to a somewhat larger building. Like most Victorian architecture, it appeared tall and narrow, with its three-story brick front and crenellations trimmed in white, its large windows gazing serenely out at the world. Behind it, though, it stretched somewhat wider than at first glance, and ran back and back through a warren of rooms. Over the main door, gold lettering still proclaimed _Shepherd & Sons Pharmacy_ on a field of black, although the display windows indicated the building had been turned to other purposes.

The cowbell jangled as Erik kneed the door open, startling a small flock of customers and scattering them from the display of cat postcards. Erik glowered at them – his wrath, Charles observed, was probably the single best shoplifting deterrent they had, and almost invariably kept small children in line – and stalked behind the counter.

"Oh, lovely," Charles purred as he caught sight of the paper bag. "I hope you got extra pickles."

"Have I ever disappointed you?" Erik asked. Charles appropriated the bag and hovered over it possessively. "And my sandwich is in there too, so you'll have to hand that over sooner or later."

Charles dug into the bag and extracted a wax-paper package and bag of chips before surrendering it to Erik. As he unwrapped his sandwich, he said, "We had ten people come in while you – oh, _lovely_ – while you were gone, to see the museum. I think they were waiting until you left."

"Maybe you should quit teaching and just run this place," Erik said, with a supplementary glower at the customers, who had migrated over to the used-book section. He glanced at the tattered book by Charles's elbow, _The X-Men: Part One (Beginnings)_. "I see you found the prequel. Are you planning on selling it?"

"God no," Charles said through a mouthful of sandwich. "It's really quite an affecting story."

"I'm surprised we actually have books to sell." Erik started in on his own sandwich, sparing one eye for the customers while the rest of his attention wandered around the shop. _His_ shop, if he wanted to be legal about it, with his name on the building lease and the paperwork, one of the first times after the trial he'd signed his true, legal name to anything. He'd set up the shop himself, everything from the shelves to the phone to the computer not even Charles knew how to work properly, and it was a thing, a place, his own, the first thing in a long time he could say that about, other than Charles.

Or, rather, it was Old Stuff Antiques and the Xavier-Lehnsherr Institute for Higher Learning, the finest selection of random, bizarre antiques from the Xavier family collections. A reliquary with a saint's preserved pinky finger (from the days when the family was quite emphatically Catholic; apparently Serafina Xavier had simply _taken_ Saint Boniface's pinky from a Spanish cathedral while on pilgrimage, slipping it into a bag while crossing herself) greeted visitors on their entrance to the rooms containing the museum. Directly behind that sat a taxidermied mandrill clutching an enema apparatus that had, according to the card, accompanied Napoleon's army on its Russian campaign. (The enema apparatus, not the mandrill; the mandrill had been an ill-gotten gain from one of Great-great Grandfather Xavier's trips to London.) Beyond them numerous other curiosities lived in their display cases or, sometimes, free-standing; the only collection not represented was Great- _grandpère_ Xavier, not for Erik's lack of trying.

"Entertaining _and_ informative," Charles said, having caught Erik staring bemusedly at the curtain leading back to the museum. "And really, it was more than past time to start cleaning out the attics. I've never really understood why people collect things just to _have_ them."

"Of course you don't," Erik said absently, thinking about how books and bookcases had taken over the places once occupied by Brian Xavier's old pharmaceutical bottle collection. "But I suppose it's good to have things, sometimes… familiar things. In moderation."

"Of course," Charles murmured, and with a soft smile, laced their fingers together. It made eating his sandwich somewhat more difficult, but with the warm pressure of Charles's hand in his, Erik found he didn't mind much.

The customers chose that moment to intrude, because customers always knew how to make themselves inconvenient. At least they were buying things, Erik thought with a scowl, a handful of cat postcards and a fascinator for the little girl in the party. Charles smiled and offered her a piece of candy, which she accepted shyly and clutched to her chest, and which made Erik sigh.

"That only encourages them to come back, you know," Erik told him when they'd finally gotten rid of the customers and the shop had descended into silence again.

"Somehow I don't think you grasp certain basic business principles," Charles said. "Encouraging people to come back is, in fact, a central component of how to run a successful – _mmmph_!"

Kissing Charles, Erik reflected hazily, would never get old, not the soft gasp as Charles opened to him and let Erik lick his way in, or the curve of his mouth that said he was possibly trying not to smile – how he always _did_ smile when they broke apart, truly, absolutely delighted in and with Erik – and the unself-conscious ease of how he melted against Erik and still held him steady. Charles slid off his stool and happily let Erik push him up against the counter, thighs bracketing Erik's and Erik stroking absently at the warm hooks of Charles's hipbones underneath his jeans.

"You should probably," Erik growled as he nipped at Charles's lovely, lovely mouth, "go lock the door, because I'm going to have to do extremely indecent things to you."

"The display window," Charles protested, and when he broke away to glance anxiously at the window, like they might already have attracted an audience (which Erik was fine with, let people look and be jealous of what Erik had), Erik settled for biting up the humid length of Charles's neck. "People – oh god, Erik – yes, that's – that's perfect."

And really, Erik thought as the building slept quietly around them and Charles returned all his considerable attention to making out, settling himself more comfortably on Erik's legs and evincing an interest in the skin under Erik's t-shirt, it _was_ perfect. It really was.

.end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god, this is finally done. I don't know what I am feeling right now, it's all very confusing.
> 
> When I started out writing this, I never planned for the story to go the way it did. It was supposed to be fluffy and ridiculous and a bit humorous, because, I mean, come on, Erik owns an antiques shop and Charles is a professor whose family has a long history of collecting truly bizarre objects. But then about halfway through the second chapter, things started to go sideways and then decided to stop merely going sideways and go in all sorts of nonsensical directions as various ideas along the lines of "hey what if Charles and Moira used to be in a relationship?" and "what if Erik were trying to kill Sebastian Shaw, the international criminal who murdered his family?" began to suggest themselves. Before I knew it, Erik was on the run from a violent past and Charles was subtly, but profoundly, messed up on an emotional level, and Raven had a writing group, and Moira was a federal agent trying to keep Erik from being killed while she built her case. I suppose, if you could describe it as anything, the fic turned into a tragidramamantic epic comedy. Sometimes it puzzles me if I think about it too much, because I don't think I've ever had a story end up being completely _not_ what I intended in the first place.
> 
> By the fifth chapter or so, I realized also that things were way too far along for me to come up with a new, proper title, so this will always remain "The one where Erik owns an antiques shop and Charles is a professor." Because, by the end, it _is_ true.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who's read, kudos'ed, and commented on the past 52,000 words of weirdness. Really, it means more than I can say, and I hope you enjoyed the ride! <3333


	20. Tag: Practical cats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Perhaps he's still upset about the opera," her husband said.
> 
> "Dear, _I_ was upset about the opera. The soprano was appallingly off-key; her voice was the proverbial fingernail down a blackboard." Puccini must have been spinning in his grave; she hoped the Metropolitan had sense enough to be embarrassed. "Tibbles only did what I wish I could have done." Unfortunately, it had been some years since Francesca had been limber enough to leap down from the Xaviers' second-tier box.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't think I'd ever be revisiting this AU again, but here we are.
> 
> So, inadvertently, one of my favorite characters ended up being _Ma mère_ Xavier and her legion of cats. For some reason I was thinking about them today, so I decided to write a little bit of a snippet. Featuring lots of cats, a forbearing husband, and a painfully adorable Charles.

Francesca Xavier sat enthroned on a cushioned divan beneath one of the estate's massive, spreading oak trees. A glass and pitcher of tea sat, dripping condensation, at her right hand. At her left sat Shadow, who kneaded her dress enthusiastically and purred as she scratched behind his ear. Shadow loved having his ears scratched. Eunice sat enthroned on her hip, daintily washing her paw and watching her kittens, Boo and Beau, tumbling on the grass in a tiger-striped ball.

"Timothy," Francesca asked. "Have you seen Pangur Ban? Where did he get to?"

"I couldn't say, dear," her husband said with the patience of a man used to being asked more about the welfare of cats than his own. "Maybe he went to the stable again."

"Oh, silly Pangur," Francesca sighed. "He's convinced he's going to catch that barn mouse."

"Yes, dear," said her husband from where she had positioned him on a nearby chair. He checked his watch. "Brian should be here soon. Perhaps we ought to put the cats away for Charles's allergies?"

"Nonsense." Francesca scratched Shadow's ear more firmly. The black cat's purring escalated to a deep buzzing hum, like a distant airplane. "It's a matter of exposure, Timothy. Once he's got used to them, he'll be fine."

Francesca said this in such a way as to make it clear Charles's allergies _would_ correct themselves. At sixty-two, with a career first as a violinist and then as a businesswoman behind her, she had more or less gotten used to all things, humans and natural phenomena alike, cooperating with her expectations. This was evident in her appearance, neatly-pressed and put together in summer dress and shawl, and a certain way of holding herself despite having two cats on her – oh, and a third, Francesca realized; Lucy the tortoiseshell had appeared and was now rubbing herself along Francesca's calf.

"Well, now almost all of us are here," Francesca said happily. She scanned the lawn and the patch of shade under the oak for Tibbles, but the fat Maine Coon was nowhere to be found. "Timothy, _where_ is Tibbles?"

"In his downstairs basket," replied her husband. "I saw him there when I was bringing out our drinks."

"Poor dear doesn't like the heat." With a scowl for the weather's effrontery in discomfiting one of her cats, Francesca took a sip of her iced tea.

"Perhaps he's still upset about the opera," her husband said.

"Dear, _I_ was upset about the opera. The soprano was appallingly off-key; her voice was the proverbial fingernail down a blackboard." Puccini must have been spinning in his grave; she hoped the Metropolitan had sense enough to be embarrassed. "Tibbles only did what I wish I could have done." Unfortunately, it had been some years since Francesca had been limber enough to leap down from the Xaviers' second-tier box.

Timothy seemed to have nothing to say to that, which was just as well. Francesca spied Brian and Sharon appearing from behind the box hedge, Brian walking quickly – such a good son, eager to see his mother – and Sharon picking her way across the gravel as if looking for booby-traps. Without dislodging Shadow or Eunice, Francesca straightened on her divan and waved.

"Hello, Mama," Brian said as he stepped under the shade. He bent down to kiss her on her cheek. Shadow batted at his tie.

"Hello, dear." Francesca gave him a buss in return. "How was your trip down?"

"Oh, as usual," Brian said. It meant that Sharon had either slept or made quietly critical remarks about Brian's driving, and that Charles had left behind the _one book_ he absolutely wanted to read at that minute and couldn't do without. "Hello, Dad."

"Brian," Timothy said cordially. "How was your trip down?"

"I already asked him that, dear, pay attention" Francesca said. Sharon had joined them by now, likely squinting at them from behind her sunglasses. Sharon had never approved of the cats, but Francesca didn't approve of Sharon – and the cats didn't approve of her, either – so they were even. Pointedly, Francesca stroked Eunice's tiger-striped fur.

"Where's my grandson?" her husband asked.

"Oh, back up at the house, probably trying to get a cookie out of Mabel," Brian said with a laugh. Sharon sniffed; cookies – or any kind of junk food – were also things of which Sharon did not approve. It made Francesca want to tell Charles they would be having ice cream for dinner. If Mabel hadn't already planned the menu to within an inch of its life, she would have. Brian wrapped an arm around his wife, laughing at her scoldingly. "It's just one cookie, dear. He knows he can't have anything else until dinner."

"I'd brought trail mix and some crackers for his snack," Sharon said discontentedly as she settled herself on one of the empty chairs, as far from Francesca as she could get.

"It'll keep; he can have it tomorrow," Brian said. "And speak of the devil…"

"There's Tibbles!" Francesca cooed. "And my grandson! Timothy, where is your camera?"

"Right here, dear," her husband said, and obediently began to take pictures.

Six-year-old Charles was waddling down the gravel walkway, clutching a very large and reluctant Tibbles to his chest. He had his arms wrapped under the cat's front legs, so the rest of the cat – who, stretched to full length, was nearly as long as Charles was tall – dangled awkwardly, like a furry, disgruntled apron. Tibbles's green eyes were large with indignation, but also a certain resignation, and his tail flapped as if to say _see? This is what I have to put up with._

"Kitty!" shouted Charles. "Ma-mère!"

"Charles!" Francesca called back. "What do you have there?"

"Kitty!" Charles said again. He huffed and puffed his way off the path and down the hill the tree, his little legs working as quickly as they could. Tibbles's lower body swayed back and forth. "Ma-mère, I found your kitty."

" _Such_ a dear," sighed Francesca. Her grandson was entirely precious, nearly as precious as the cats, with his curly brown hair and Xavier-blue eyes and pink cheeks. She wondered if she might be able to convince Brian and Sharon to let her photograph him with the cats the next time she made postcards. "Thank you for finding Tibbles for me."

Charles deposited Tibbles on Francesca's divan and beamed up at her, flushed and triumphant with having successfully completed an epic journey from the house to the backyard while carrying fifteen pounds of reluctant cat. For his part, Tibbles attempted to act like nothing had happened, curling himself into a compact ball of fur and frowning out at the world from slitted eyes. Francesca stroked him soothingly and reminded herself to give Tibbles some extra herring tonight.

"How are you my love?" Francesca asked her grandson after collecting a smacking kiss on the cheek and making sure Charles had appropriately greeted Spider, Eunice, and Lucy.

It got her a rambling five minute explanation of how Charles was fine, with digressions on what he had seen on their drive down – all the animals, the trees, interesting license plates – and his schoolwork. He was starting kindergarten a year early because he was bored at preschool, and they had uniforms like in Daddy's old school pictures, and Daddy had taken him to his lab one day and Charles had asked _ten thousand million_ questions about it until it was his naptime, and then he had ten thousand million more. Then Mama had taken him shopping one day and he had gotten lost and she had "almost called in the state troopers, Charles," but a nice Nordstrom's saleslady had found him and had let him draw in her office until they found Mama – who, in Charles's opinion, had been the one who'd gone missing.

"My," Francesca said, "that does sound very exciting."

"And today we came here!" Charles finished triumphantly. He patted Tibbles firmly on the head. "And I found your kitty for you, he was meowing at the back door like he wanted to come out, but I didn't want _him_ to get lost."

"You know," Francesca said to Charles as she gave him a hug, despite knowing the hair on his t-shirt would transfer to her own dress, "I think good boys who find missing kitties deserve an extra treat after dinner."

"I really don't think – " Sharon began.

"This is what grandparents are for, Sharon dear," Francesca said briskly. "How does Mabel's homemade ice cream sound, Charles?"

"Ice cream!" Charles bounced and clapped his hands. And sneezed.


End file.
